[rectang]

> why mess with something that has so few down sides?

When I look at high frequency trading, it says to me that the game is rigged. It's like going on Jeopardy up against a machine contestant that always buzzes in first.

How on earth can I possibly succeed as an individual investor in a trading environment where institutional investors are so privileged? How many other ways is the ostensibly neutral marketplace overseer profiting by offering those who pay-to-play opportunities to shave pennies, nickels, dimes, and dollars from me?

[jessaustin]

If investing is not your full-time occupation, you shouldn't be trading every day. (You probably shouldn't be trading every week.) If you expect a regularly-traded security to appreciate over the next month, it's entirely possible to enter an order to purchase that security, and later to sell it, without being beaten out of a few pennies by HFT.

[kasey_junk]

> When I look at high frequency trading, it says to me that the game is rigged.

And when I hear this complaint, I don't understand the rationale. Why shouldn't participants that do something professionally, invest in infrastructure, invest in research or other kinds of IP have an advantage. If they didn't that wouldn't be a market, that would be a lottery.

Quite simply, the market dynamics that make it such that you might want to be involved in it as an individual are created by the sophisticated market participants engaging in individual zero sum trades that add up to a beneficial whole and they have been for hundreds of years.

Computers have made this process more efficient and you should be celebrating your ability to trade for cheaper than ever. That you don't is a sign that you don't understand how the markets work now nor how they have ever worked.

Edit: the more I thought about this, the more I decided it was overly harsh. I think well informed participants can disagree about the values of HFT and needn't celebrate it. I do think that the idea that markets don't (or shouldn't) reward more engaged participants is fundamentally broken.

[sirseal]

HFT is a tool of oppression. Who can afford it? Who has the time, capital, and personnel to make and deploy HFT algos? And ultimately, who is really benefitting the most from this technological advance?

[djfm]

Could "High Frequency Trading As A Service" be a thing? Someone provides the infrastructure and a nice API to talk with the market and runs your algorithms on their hyperfast computers at the heart of the stock exchange for a fee.

[savanaly]

> How on earth can I possibly succeed as an individual investor in a trading environment where institutional investors are so privileged?

Economists have sort of argued that it was impossible to succeed in the way you're talking about since long before HFT came along. The classic explanation is presented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street.