The boundary is "arbitrary", but clearly there has to be one, otherwise we're all nodding in agreement as trading speed heads inexorably towards Plank time units.

We have some convenient "lines in the sand" that we can use as a guide:

- To make trading fair globally, the round-trip time for light around the planet could be multiplied a couple of times. That's about a second.

- The fastest possible time a human can parse the meaning of a long headline (not the full news article!) is... about a second.

- Nobody in their right mind should be buying any significant volume of shares without double-checking their order. There's no way to do this even vaguely carefully in under... a second.

Etc...

Bots trading faster than a second are trading with each other, and the only signals they have are each other.

Humans are what markets are for, not bots.

This reminds me of a story from WWII where a bunch of generals took a holiday at the same time, leaving a junior general in charge. He was in a bit of a panic because he was expecting to be overloaded with work... but found it easy. The generals were making work for each other by requesting reports, organising meetings with each other, etc...

Bots make work for bots, they generate signals for bots ever faster, to be processed by faster bots still, etc...

It's just... nonsense. Zero real information is being generated, they're just "riffing" off of the much less frequent human-initiated trades, all of which take minutes to organise and execute with due diligence.

It's like being asked to write a 10-page essay on a three-line poem.

The only non-arbitrary boundary is the one set by physics. Everything else is arbitrary. There are ways to greatly reduce front-running of orders, but that actually is an orthogonal issue to HFT and microstructure level trading.

Limiting trading to human reaction times is much less arbitrary than what we are doing now.

Seems like an arbitrary comment.

Which tradition inspires your view...

a) https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.90b.1?lang=bi&with=Introd...

b) https://sunnah.com/nasai/44

You have posted this nonsensical comment 3 times.

And you keep incessantly posting about the moral evils of speculation which is only tangentially related to the Texas Stock Exchange. I guess morality policing makes your comments better?

HFT is not the same thing as speculation.

Which moral doctrines/strictures do you think it violates?

Basic fairness

It's a tradeoff. Suppose you are relegated to trading once per minute and you need to allocate $x per trade to make a profit. If you can trade 100 times per minute you need $x/100 to make a profit.

Or, maybe your strategy doesn't make money when you can trade once per minute, but does at a higher frequency.

What is fair about saying someone has to have 100x the capital to participate? You are focusing only on one dimension of cost, when there are several.