What? THAT CASH comes from owning the inside spread on roughly half of every US equity share that trades. They quote a micro-price adjustment, and it pushes out anyone slower - which exactly the “service” that lets retail investors, like us, hit a bid or ask.

Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale

The ghost of Charlie Munger has entered the chat.

Get to my original reply to you with all the sources first :) then Charlie can join in the fun!

Your argument is unconvincing.

Even if the HFT market is 100 times the smallest estimate, it's still a relatively small portion of the world economy, which is approximately $100 trillion. HFT is a fascinating intersection of finance/C++/JVM for competitive super-nerds. It happens to add liquidity to the market, as far as I understand. I am not demonizing it in any way.

However, it's not a significant portion of the US or global economy by any stretch. The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point.

>"HFT is a fascinating intersection of finance/C++/JVM for competitive super-nerds. It happens to add liquidity to the market, as far as I understand. I am not demonizing it in any way."

>"The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point."

Sure, I respect that!