Read this old, unsurprising report in New Scientist. From the article:

Automated trading ...has come to account for more than half of trades in many markets around the globe. ...Because of the finite speed of light, trading speed depends on where you are sitting. ...“The basic insight,” says Wissner-Gross, “is that the optimal location lets the trader exploit fluctuations equally on both exchanges.” ...“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud

If this is how money and the free markets work now, I’m pretty sure we no longer know what words mean.

Today I read two letters written by companies which impressed me.

The first is by Kickstarter. Some asshole was trying to raise money to produce a “seduction guidebook” which advocated sexual assault of women, and though many people asked Kickstarter to cancel the project before the funding period completed, they didn’t. Then today they wrote a (seemingly) sincere letter of apology to their users, and by way of compensation have donated $25,000 to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organisation.

Read more…

I am, to the best of my abilities, divesting myself of fossil-fuels, monetarily. I don’t have any money invested anywhere (or much full stop), but that doesn’t mean that what little money I do have can be used by others for ill.

So far I have cancelled my bank accounts at Halifax, Natwest and Lloyds (which is particularly bad), and moved completely over to The Co-Operative, which is the only high-street bank which has an explicit policy of not investing money in “any business or organisation whose core activity contributes to global climate change”.

The next step is to check what USS invests its money in, and remove any of mine which is supporting malign corporate interests.

I am more-or-less following The Guardian’s ongoing series on personal divestment.