Panther was a one-man shop that did nothing but market manipulation. Yes, they used automation but for every Panther, there are 1000 manual traders being fined

Panther was a one-man shop that did nothing but market manipulation. Yes, they used automation but for every Panther, there are 1000 manual traders being fined by CME for spoofing every year. Automation doesn't imply state of the art HFT. The Flash Crash spoofer was using a Trading Technologies system that any small trader can rent with a few scripts loaded in. Look at real players with hundreds of employees. None of them make their money from market manipulation. It's all from low-latency arbitrage. If you're fast, you can make way, way more money doing legitimate trading than market manipulation.