What is the future?

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What is the future of finance? Does anybody foresee any drastic changes, good and bad? Death of traders or of 'black box' investing/hedge funds. Maybe some sort of regularization of certain markets? A boom in certain areas?
 
What is the future of finance? Does anybody foresee any drastic changes, good and bad? Death of traders or of 'black box' investing/hedge funds. Maybe some sort of regularization of certain markets? A boom in certain areas?

what is exactly your concern? Assume that there is a dramatic change, what does it matter?
 
I think there is an opportunity for an "Open Source" hedge fund. You say exactly what you are going to do, and do it. Your compeititve advantage being efficient execution.
Transparency will be attractive to some, managing only 1% of this market is quite a tidy sum...

As for fully "black" boxes, I observe algorithmic trading expanding, not contracting. Currently, the way most fund managers, HFers, et al work they might as well be 100% secret from the perspective of those who put their money in.

There will be random acts of regulation. None will be useful, and all they will create is regulatory arbitrage opportunities.
My take, as expounded in a couple of threads here and on Wilmott.com is that the mid term prospect is that financial markets will become less regulated, not more.

Indian is deregulating, and I perceive that when we hit the next economic upswing so will China.
The US I think will regulate more. Given that >50% of my business is in London, I'm very happy with this. It's easy to forget that London was reborn as a major market centre when the rest of its economy was a complete slum. Some parts only failed to qualify as "slums" because they were quite literally bomb craters.
The home of European markets should have been Frankfurt, or just maybe Paris, not London.
But...
President Kennedy put in some amazingly dumb rules, and London got to critical mass.
London beat Frankfurt because the German government really hated the "locusts" in the free market, and taxed/regulated the markets so much that Frankfurt is fighting it out with Dublin for being Europe's 5th most important finance centre, it may drop to 6th.

Politicians are blaming "speculators" for current oil prices, and there exist tough rules on this in the USA which may be extended. It is not a coincidence that London is taking that market over as well.

Regulation is an optimisation term. Less is not always better, else the financial markets would be dominated by Nigeria, and German banks would not look as scary as they do.
 
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