In my experience HFT is a boogeyman. It's not well understood, and it's easy to blame for ills real and imagined - in part because you only tend to hear about it when something goes wrong and a Knight Capital type event happens, although that can apply to any firm that does any form of automated trading such as Market Makers and Algo traders and is definitely not the sole preserve of HFT shops. Based on what I know and see, I believe that the existence of HFT is generally an aid to price discovery (due to the narrower spreads), and liquidity (more actors means a better chance that someone will take the other side of a trade). In that respect, they're not too dissimilar to Market Makers, although a true market maker has additional responsibilities in terms of being willing to trade in illiquid products.
If you're not a professional trader then the topic of the article really isn't a big deal. If your trading style is such that it's significantly material whether you trade at 510 or 511, or whether your trade executes in the next minute or the next thirty minutes, then you're always going to be at a huge disadvantage compared to people who can get the best price and most immediate execution. A trading firm who are willing to pay to connect directly to an exchange will always get a better price than you can.
It's not horribly different to why the restaurant down the block from you gets better prices for produce than you do - their business affords them better access to the produce market.
Edit - For what it's worth, the bulk of my career has been in finance, mostly as a Quant-Developer at a mix of buy-side and sell-side firms and more recently as technology consultant who specializes in Capital Markets.
Yes, the never ending and hard to pin down boogeyman. Today it's HFT, tomorrow it's day traders, the next private equity. All these thing are so evil, so easy to do, and the people who do them are making so much money, which should be our money really because they're robbing our 401Ks blind.
Of course, I'm being sarcastic, but this is what media is selling and most people are buying it without any pause for reflection.
There is an obvious problem with HFT: it gives an advantage to lower latency analysis and communication, leading to huge amounts of wasted effort getting faster pipes and software, co-locating automated trading, etc. None of this is delivering real value to the economy, as far as I can see. If you have an argument for why trades that happen at millisecond time scales help liquidity and price discovery over what you'd get with a system that handled trades on the scale of minutes, I'd like to hear it. I have a hard time imagining that the benefits (to society at large) could outweigh the costs of the waste when I see what's being done.
That said, I agree that the high frequency of trades themselves are probably not the problem. The problem is rewarding a latency/processing advantage.
If a HFT firm makes a profit then they are, by definition, adding value to the economy.
All that technology investment is not a waste; it allows firms to condense money out of information asymmetries with ever greater efficiency.
Edit to add: if you prefer industries that build "real things" then look at the revenue that HFT delivers to companies who make high-speed networking and computer equipment.
My post was comparing the current system that allows millisecond scale trading with a hypothetical one that slows trades down to something on the order of minutes. Your observation that people are willing to pay to exploit information asymmetries in the current framework doesn't address the question of how my proposed change would affect net economic value.
The metric of measurement is wealth, which profits create.
Your proposed change would reduce the benefit because it would eliminate the profit (wealth) that HFT firms create.
Your proposed system is not hypothetical; it is how all trades used to happen. HFT did not arise from nothing. People developed it because it created new profit in addition to that generated by slower trading.
Suppose I'm a speculator willing to pay $0.03/share for liquidity. It's valuable for someone (I don't care who) to provide that liquidity.
If HFTs were all 100ms slower, I wouldn't care. But if HFT 1 is 100ms slower than HFT 2, then HFT2 will capture $0.03/share and HFT 1 captures nothing. It's a wasteful arms race. It's also fixable simply by eliminating the subpenny rule.
It's not that it would eliminate it, but it would make the margins to due pure latency arbitrage so small as to make it not worthwhile (in theory anyway).
That said, there is and always will be an advantage to players that can respond more nimbly to changing market conditions (news being one input to this) and there is no inherent problem with that (and there may be lots of positives to the market as a whole).
Have you considered this post in light of the inverted exchanges BYX, EDGA, and BX? You can effectively make your liquidity cheaper by posting to an exchange with an inverted fee schedule (pay to add, rebate when you take), but we still see the "latency arms race" at the traditional exchanges.
Moving the decimal point to the right just increases by 10x the volume necessary to create the same profit. I think a likely result would be massive consolidation to a couple big companies, who would then compete once again on latency but at much higher volumes.
If you're not a professional trader then the topic of the article really isn't a big deal. If your trading style is such that it's significantly material whether you trade at 510 or 511, or whether your trade executes in the next minute or the next thirty minutes, then you're always going to be at a huge disadvantage compared to people who can get the best price and most immediate execution. A trading firm who are willing to pay to connect directly to an exchange will always get a better price than you can.
It's not horribly different to why the restaurant down the block from you gets better prices for produce than you do - their business affords them better access to the produce market.
Edit - For what it's worth, the bulk of my career has been in finance, mostly as a Quant-Developer at a mix of buy-side and sell-side firms and more recently as technology consultant who specializes in Capital Markets.