It's not hard to see who benefits from these taxes. You avoid the tax by trading a swap/CFD/forward (outside the U.S., if necessary). This means that your marke

It's not hard to see who benefits from these taxes. You avoid the tax by trading a swap/CFD/forward (outside the U.S., if necessary). This means that your market maker is a bank instead of an HFT firm. More of the order flow becomes internalized so there's less incentive to post competitive quotes on public exchanges. I think it's very telling that many of the articles talk about the evils of HFT without addressing internalization. It's true that this type of tax can easily be avoided, but the real problem is that it incentivizes trading to move from public exchanges to banks' walled gardens.