I guess I don't understand why 'transitory gaming' is a bad thing in the stock market. I agree that it is immoral for Enron to reduce the supply of electricity

I guess I don't understand why 'transitory gaming' is a bad thing in the stock market. I agree that it is immoral for Enron to reduce the supply of electricity, while towns are having brown-outs, just to raise the price. The same is true of hoarding much needed commodities, just to raise their price. I'm not even a big fan of speculatively buying up domain names. However, stocks can not be consumed. For most people, there is no reason to transact in the financial market other than financial gain. I don't see how this type of trading automated trading harms retirement investments. High frequency exists because exchanges now allow electronic transactions and automated matching. Algorithmic trading (which generally means automating the execution of large number of shares, such as institutional (retirement funds) orders) have also greatly benefited from same opportunities. If the complaint is that when retirement funds buy or sell large number of shares, HF guys come in and pick them off -- this is no different from regular day traders (or even professional traders). In fact, large trades have no "right of way" in the stock market. If you are buying a million shares of some stock, other traders will react and raise the bid. This is not a subversion of how the market works, this is the essence of price discovery and how the market is supposed to work. >I see the market as connecting investors with investments. Spending heavily to leverage momentary arbitrage does not, in my perspective, add significantly to the base function of the market. But does it take away from the base function? Just because some rich guy is spending money on computers, routers, programmers and mathematicians does not mean the market is negatively effected. Surely the burden is on the critics to prove why HF is bad.