tl;dr: We missed out on Facebook because of regulation. regulation lowers market efficiency, markets have always evolved, HFT improves pricing and order fulfill

tl;dr: We missed out on Facebook because of regulation. regulation lowers market efficiency, markets have always evolved, HFT improves pricing and order fulfillment Like seemingly everything wired writes these days this article is nonsense, written from the perspective of an agenda. Wired regularly comes out with these neo-luddite articles. The reality is, software bugs cause money. Knight was punished for their "sins". Meanwhile I profit because HFT makes the market more efficient for me. I know this with certainty because I trade derivatives (options spreads) and I've done so in areas where there is no HFT and where there is a lot of HFT. My orders go better at closer prices when there's HFT going on. I've experienced the additional market liquidity first hand, and the underlying is shockingly stable for the nature of the business, so I don't think anyone could say that HFT is destabilizing the stock price. At this point people might be tempted to shout "anecdote" but the thing is, economics and reason also support this view. Thinly traded markets are simply less price efficient because there are less people analyzing price and thus willing to buy or sell at a little better price. Computers are efficient at this (I know almost all the counter parties to my trades are computers, it is really easy to see because they react instantaneously to my actions.) Finally let me point something out. Facebooks IPO has been pretty poor, while Google's was great. Google was able to go public when it was still in its high growth phase. This meant that the public was able to invest in google and make very high returns. Facebook, however, grew up in a different regulatory environment, especially after 2008 (Which was itself a result of regulation in the first place, though for political reasons we're fed a constant stream of lies to the contrary) ... in this regulatory environment going public is much more difficult. Thus, instead of you and me profiting from buying facebook stock in 2006, where we would be up 100-fold by now, only venture capitalists and large companies were allowed to participate in that. This is really a shame. In the 1990s a company like facebook would have gone public much earlier. People seem to think that because there was a bubble (again government created) and some companies went bust that somehow magically "regulation" will "protect" people. It doesn't, it just hurts people. We all missed out on Facebook, and now facebook was forced into a situation where its stock is going to suck wind for awhile-- hurting the entire startup sector. But it always starts with articles like this-- nonsense to scare people about HFT, this creates the political support for legislation (which always favors certain interests, not the least of which are the politicians who wouldn't do it otherwise) at the expense of society.