I think you missed his main point.

His main point: Wall Street doesn’t know what business it is in. Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal.

He's saying wall street should have an incentive to create/raise capital for businesses, not invest in marginally profitable trading strategies like HFT.

The opportunity cost of wall street investing in trading is that other pursuits like capital raising get less or no attention.

So it's not that HFT is necessarily good or bad, it's that it's a distraction that's not going away, to the detriment of other potentially more value-creating pursuits, like raising capital for new companies.

Does anyone here even have any experience in NYC, or on Wall Street?

Wall street knows what business it's in...lots of them. It does bond research, equity research, investment management, sales and trading, and yes, investment banking (to raise capital to all these poor companies that can't find anyone to pay millions of dollars in fees to do)

Do people really think that there are no investment bankers who raise capital anymore? That because of HFT, a job that pays 1mm a year when you're 30 has no more interest to anybody? That there are so many humanities majors graduating from princeton and harvard that normally do client relationship investment banking but because of HFT, they are going to write algorithms and optimize OS code for latency instead?

Have people seen how many layoffs are happening in investment banking division on wall street? (where they raise the capital for companies) It is NOT A ZERO SUM GAME. HFT doing well is NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF CAPITAL RAISING.

What kind of point is this? Is it even informed by any facts?

No, most of the people here have no experience in high-end trading. And no, it's not informed by facts. It's very frustrating, but if it's any consolation, it's the same kind of struggle against ignorance that occurs on threads about cryptography (a nerd subject) or language design (another nerd subject).

Personally, I'm not irritated at the nerds (after all, I'm one of them) so much as I am at places like Zero Hedge and Rolling Stone which prey on the ignorance of nerds to drive up pageviews.

Agreed, those blogs/publications are horrendous. Just factual stuff that is wrong all over the place. I wouldn't mind if people had concerns, as long as they realize it's a very complicated subject, so maybe they should ask questions, instead of making stupid assertions that are clearly false and try to sound like experts in a subject they've thought about for 10 minutes.

Zero Hedge was an excellent site in its early days before it became popular. Most of the good contributors have left the site, understandably.

And Matt Taibbi was responsible for the legendary characterization of Goldman Sachs as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity."

I'm having a very hard time responding to the idea that extraordinarily bad technical reporting on the trading markets is redeemed by colorful writing. Is he a journalist or a poet?

I get it: people like reading this stuff. That's why they write it that way. But I'm saying, like reading it or don't like reading it, a lot of the underlying facts being reported are laughable.

I'm given to understand that the reason we have high-frequency traders being as crazy as they are is that there's a (government-mandated) rule where you can't price anything in increments of less than $0.01. 1 penny times hundreds or thousands of shares starts a minute starts to add up.

So instead of being able to compete on price, market-makers compete on latency in order to be the one making all the monies, resulting in the current arms race.

Cf. this blog: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/subpenny_rule_respons...

The 1 penny used to be 12.5 pennies, not long ago.

That is yummifajita's blog, btw.

There are still human market makers on the NYSE and some argue that their presence in that market makes it more stable.

By demanding automation, HFT drives down the operational cost of a particular transaction. However, for trades themselves, it's arguable that it drives up the cost of the overall transaction for long-term traders - especially those who end up needing to break up a larger overall stock transactions into smaller batches.

I find it hard to believe the overhead of doing that comes to more than $.24/share.

It does mean the market demands more knowledge; it's more sensitive now, so you can no longer do a buy or sell "at market" and expect a good price. But even if you don't know how to play the market you can go through a broker and still pay far less than you would've in the "good old days".