No, its not meaningless -- A lot of good comes from discourse, but its my opinion that HFT takes a disproportionate amount of flak for their real market impact.

No, its not meaningless -- A lot of good comes from discourse, but its my opinion that HFT takes a disproportionate amount of flak for their real market impact. The financial sector at large is massive [1], and people seem to think that HFT is proportional in size, but its actually quite small, weighing in at ~2Bn in annual profits [2], which is a blip compared to Google's AdSense revenues. Google does all sorts of good things too though, so I'm not saying that we should reallocate all of Google's engineers to curing cancer, but I think the amount of discourse allocated to vilifying HFT and imagining ways to make "smart people do other things" is out of control. Edit: Got to read pg's response to @joebadmo about what the dispute is -- No, I don't think its sinister to criticise. I think that's productive and great things start with discourse. I _do_ worry that when issues get blown out of hand people to change the lives of others in ways to coerce them to operate in ways congruent with their moral code. The criticism is fine, but exacting policy to prevent others from doing amoral things is problematic. The (likely bad) analogue for this is European and American cultural imperialism. Obviously I don't think HFT is "immoral" as others have stated. (I do also think that HFTraders are compensated disproportionately highly w.r.t. their contribution to society, but that isn't unique to HFT's and is far more pronounced in other subfields in finance, and possibly startupdom). [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-friends-get-into-finance/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/26/friends-don%E2%80%99t-let-f... [2] http://www.tradeworx.com/TWX-SEC-2010.pdf http://www.tradeworx.com/TWX-SEC-2010.pdf