I think it is odd to conflate "bright people reducing the latency of trades" with "rigging and illegal activity". It seems to me that the former are rarely invo

I think it is odd to conflate "bright people reducing the latency of trades" with "rigging and illegal activity". It seems to me that the former are rarely involved in the latter. One only needs to look at the libor cases, the FX fixing cases, or the gold fixing case. I actually have a pet conspiracy theory that the articles about HFT are the result of lobbying on the part of banks. When I worked at a bank, I did see articles that were heavily influenced by employees of the bank. This influence was never nefarious, but I can see how a traditional trader's biases may have lead to some of these HFT articles. I rarely see articles about the evils of internalization, something that I strongly believe brings great harm to the markets. At the same time, I often see articles about how HFT takes advantage of the market and brings little benefit when I've made internal measurements that show just the opposite. Of course none of the above is any sort of advice, and it's probably appropriate for me to note that I've worked as trader at a bank and currently work as a trader at an HFT firm.