You are oversimplifying and overcomplicating at the same time. If it was an easy/obvious zero-sum game, we'd not have people going into finance at all. MIT doe

You are oversimplifying and overcomplicating at the same time. If it was an easy/obvious zero-sum game, we'd not have people going into finance at all. MIT does not teach "HFT", those "MIT PHD Quants" are just as untrained in finance as you are. The rest is math, something that requires time to study but not necessarily a certificate. And creativity. I've only seen a single HFT-algo that made me say "wow, that's creative"; all others were just straight implementations of finance "wisdom".