My point is that I don't think it's a huge volume of capital. The extra wasted capital here is the cost of running an HFT firm while you test your strategy (aka

My point is that I don't think it's a huge volume of capital. The extra wasted capital here is the cost of running an HFT firm while you test your strategy (aka. see if your liquidity is valuable or not) -- if it's not profitable, it's not a huge loss (HFT firms, in the grand scheme of things, are relatively small) and the firm shuts down; if it's profitable, then clearly they're trading against non-HFTs that value their liquidity, so what's the issue here?