>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
The HFT industry creates an investment opportunity that's somewhat detached from business fundamentals. If you can trade on the volatility alone, you no longer need to pick investments based on their future prospects and behaviour.
Last I checked, Apple makes arguably useful products like smartphones and laptops.
Though admittedly the former have turned into pocket attention black holes (and enragement/slot machines) and Apple itself created the scourge of public Facetime calls.
I know some people don't see these as benefits (compared to "useful products like smartphones"), but we do cause instrument pricing to be more accurate and a thinner buy/sell spread and greatly increase liquidity.
It might be helpful to explain in plain language what you mean by increasing liquidity. As I understand it, marginal spread reductions only marginally improve your ability to sell at or near a particular price, and they provide no benefit to you if no one is buying near your sell price, or if there aren't enough buyers available overall.
But it would be interesting to see some quantitative data on the effect.
Increasing volatility and enabling fast algorithmic trading may not be good things overall, even if some traders benefit.
And as I noted, if you care about fairness in an online game, usually you try to remove the penalty effects from long ping times (or the bonus effects from short ping.)
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?