[snowwrestler]

It's amazing to me that people get so worked up about HFT when the same arguments apply to 90% of "tech" companies.

> Are the people writing these algorithms even remotely thinking that the trades can ruin or starve millions ?

No they can't, by definition, high frequency trades have very small price deltas and each one matters very very little to the broader market.

An abstract way to think of HFT is that it condenses money out of information. This is exactly what ad-driven businesses like Google and Facebook do too, but HFT doesn't require massive databases of information about all of us, plus it is more energy efficient because it doesn't have to send the same copy of a cat GIF over the air to 350 million people just to make half a cent in ad sales.