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Day Trading Everything
from the there's-a-market-for-that dept
The financial wizards on Wall Street like to come up with all sorts of different financial vehicles for trading all sorts of things in slices (defined by money, of course). However, perhaps we need better overall platforms for alternative markets. The Stalwart has a great post about the ongoing market for hotel rooms in Hong Kong. It turns out that travel agencies buy up the rooms in bulk, and there's apparently a semi-active "day trading" market between the different agencies, as new information (weather, conferences, airfare promotions, etc.) comes out among the travel agencies who hope to buy the rooms at a cheaper rate and either sell them at profit to other agencies, or eventually just out to travelers (as a last resort, of course). What's not clear, though, is how they handle these trades. Is there an electronic system for trading hotel rooms? If not, why not?
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New Inefficiencies
So in other words, technology has created new layers of middlemen, inefficiency, and bloat -- instead of getting rid of them as promised. Hotels will have empty rooms, customers won't be able to get them, while financial middlemen claim "record profits" in their abstract shell games.
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