[jmcmichael]

> 1) The myth of the HFT geniuses.

Myth? The finance industry, where the HFT folks are near the top, pays epic salaries for the smartest people. They do this to hire the best and the brightest, and would not continue to do so if it did not work.

In the documentary, Haim relates a story where the team that he was on included PhDs in bioinformatics, physics, and mathematics. This does not look like a myth to me. The mathematical knowledge required to understand and be competitive in the HFT environment, coupled with the software development knowledge is very rare. This industry consumes the time of geniuses in order to function and pays them well for it - that this attracts dumb people and bad software developers that are occasionally hired hardly makes the existence of these geniuses a myth.

> 2) We could harness all these people to something that provides more utility. It would be great if that were true, but how do you do that?

Distributed self-organized common pool resources (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common-pool_resource).

[kasey_junk]

Disclaimer) I work in HFT and this is all anecdotal.

I have found very little correlation between advanced degrees and ability to determine valuable trading strategies. In fact, the strategies that most people bemoan the most with HFT require the least amount of mathematics because they are very simple.

I've also worked outside of trading in both big institutions & start ups. The ratio of genius to average to bad seems about the same in all of these environments.

As far as the common pool resource approach, the problem with that is that it will most likely tilt the balance of power in the markets even further into the hands of a few giant institutions. Why it is popular to protect the poor investment bankers from the ravages of HFT baffles me.