It's hard to take a criticism of HFT seriously when the author very confidently asserts a rather extreme definition of it, and thus appears to be talking about

It's hard to take a criticism of HFT seriously when the author very confidently asserts a rather extreme definition of it, and thus appears to be talking about a very different subject matter than what I (and, I believe, many others) would consider HFT. From page 12, HFT encompasses not simply and not even directly the speed of trading..., but rather stands in for the general automation of trading.... HFT may be better understood as the name for the suite of effects that computerization has had on the worlds of securities trading. There is little controversy about this picture within the trading world, including both trading firms themselves and the government bodies that regulate them. In fact, there is an incredible amount of controversy surrounding this point. According to a CFTC committee [1]: Specifically, the Commission stated that HFT was a form of automated trading that employs: (a)algorithms for decision making, order initiation, generation, routing, or execution, for each individual transaction without human direction; (b)low-latency technology that is designed to minimize response times, including proximity and co-location services; (c)high speed connections to markets for order entry; and (d)recurring high message rates (orders, quotes or cancellations) determined using one or more objective forms of measurement, including cancel-to-fill ratios. Any definition of HFT should acknowledge that various types of Automated Trading can exhibit mechanical characteristics of HFT, the commission noted. “However, for automated trading to be considered HFT it needs to match the cumulative criteria that comprises the definition, including recurring high message rates determined using one or more objective forms of measurement.” [1] http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/hft-defined-by-cftc-as-subset-of-automated-trading-31398-1.html http://www.securitiestechnologymonitor.com/news/hft-defined-...