[smoyer]

That computer is artificially raising the price of the stock for someone who would buy it ... so they marginally either buy less stock, or pay more for each share.

I'm not going to argue that HFT and hedge-funds are necessarily bad (though I don't buy the liquidity argument for stocks that have reasonable volumes), but I don't see how it's helping to fund the company behind the stock at all (or make it attractive to future investors).

[graphene]

In the same way as the bid price is increased by HFT actors (which I think is what you're referring to), the ask price is decreased as well, and your hypothetical buyer would benefit from that.

These are two sides of the same coin, namely HFT decreasing the bid-ask spread, making trading (and thus capital allocation) more efficient across the board.