HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
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?
Maybe they're both bad?
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
You think you could do better by having a planned economy, with your eminence deciding what's a waste and what is not? And why should I believe you it'd end up differently than North Korea or Cuba?
Or you'd somehow manage to take what you think are all the good parts of western societies while outlawing what's wasteful and we'd have an utopia?
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?
BTW the USA is already a planned economy.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
Although not really any more. AI is really good at debugging failing tests so I no longer have to spend hours - sometimes it was even days - staring at waves and instruction traces.
Tbh that's one thing I won't miss.