[pedroza_alex]

AFAIU the service HFT forms provide to the market is liquidity. Basically allowing you to sell stocks/options as soon as you feel like it.

In turn that leads to more efficient markets since prices converge to their "correct" value faster.

[Balinares]

HFT is a different thing from what is being discussed in this thread. With HFT you're talking custom ASICs running within light-nanoseconds range of the target exchange. Ocaml very much isn't in this picture. This is about human-speed trading. Which also provides liquidity and correction of instrument prices towards their fair value, just at a different level.

The societal value of either is debatable all the same, mind you. It's more that wherever you have markets, you have money-making opportunities that can be leveraged, and therefore are.

[wk_end]

There’s a few orders of magnitude between “human-speed trading” and the absolute bleeding edge of HFT. A company like Jane Street still does automated trading far faster than any human could.

Sure, Jane Street probably isn’t the fastest in the business, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got FPGAs or ASICs, dedicated high speed pipes to shave off milliseconds of latency, things like that.