> And in a market panic, your friendly HFT shop next door is there and offering to buy and sell to stabilise the price? Some are. It's not that they are frien

> And in a market panic, your friendly HFT shop next door is there and offering to buy and sell to stabilise the price? Some are. It's not that they are friendly, it's just that doing so can be highly profitable if one can estimate the mispricing with a sufficient degree of certainty. > In which market do we benefit from milliseconds pricing, compared to, say, an auction every minute? I argue that all of the significant ones benefit. The global market is huge and interrelated in complex ways. There are many trading entities with a variety of specialties. They communicate their expertise through the markets by placing orders. It's an iterative process and a lot of information must be conveyed. The faster the entities can communicate back and forth, the more accurately the prices can represent a weighted consensus. Constraining the trading to 1 minute auctions would reduce the communication bandwidth.