[ggruschow]

HFT provides liquidity which reduces everyone else's cost and/or exposure to short term risk.

Low-latency trading though costs everyone. Nobody actually needs anything faster than a fill in a blink of an eye. The only people who think they do really need smarter match engines or to stop taking advantage of people

[pkghost]

Where does short-term risk come from? And what's the difference between HFT and LLT?

If anyone knows of good high-level reading material on the subject, I'd appreciate a link so I can spare you more dumb questions.

I admit to having drunk some of Mark Cuban's Kool-Aid, as well as Jon Stewart's and that of some other liberal sources. Their argument, as far as I understand, is that HFT doesn't provide value proportionate with that which it extracts from a system designed to connect investors with entrepreneurs.

The idea has an appealing simplicity, especially given recent history, but don't know very much about markets, so I thought I'd ask people on the other side of the debate for their take.