From what I understood, this contribution is not about making stuff nanoseconds faster, but about how this pushes spreads down. Anyone doing any trading will be happier to see the spreads smaller, wouldn't he?
Note: by spreads I mean the difference between buy and sell prices. I don't know if there is a special word for it in this context.
Exactly. HFT reduces counterparty risk for market makers (because with HFT, it's much more likely that there will be a counterparty for any given trade). This enables the market makers to reduce their bid-ask spreads; the profit from the bid-ask spread is what covers the risk a market maker faces from their market clearing obligations.
How about efficiency? People call the liquidity providing aspects of HFT 'bullshit', but computers have vastly reduced the manpower necessary to manage a market.
Each futures pit used to have hundreds of traders, who required several assistants/support and commanded a huge salary. Many firms needed multiple traders in a pit, just to be able to make sure they could provide liquidity to all possible market participants. Today, a couple strategists with a small team of programmers can cover dozens of futures markets at once.
The same principle holds across bond, FX, equity and options markets alike. HFT has supplanted a terribly inefficient market with a better one. Is it perfect or even good? Probably not, but it's magnitudes better than the traditional method.
An argument can also be made that this is a net negative contribution, as instead of a market employing hundreds of people, it's only employing dozens. Ergo, more unemployed people. While this is good for the market's owners and those currently employed to trade there, it is bad for the economy as a whole.
Not at all, but in re-reading my comment I can see why you'd think that. My intention was to make a devil's advocate comment: 2 sides to every coin, etc.
