>Actually no. HFT drive down the costs for pensions and value investors. The ones that foot the bill is the traders and the market makers that have seen their m

>Actually no. HFT drive down the costs for pensions and value investors. The ones that foot the bill is the traders and the market makers that have seen their margins collapse. As a % of profits gained from HFT, market making is small enough to not even be relevant. The more profitable strategies involve basically front running the market. >Indeed it did. There was a flash crash in 1962 as well. It took a YEAR for prices to rise again. That is not volatility. Or a flash crash. That is a CRASH crash. Wanna know how long it took for prices to rise again after the flash crash? 15 minutes. THAT'S volatility. One year? Eeeeeh, not so much. >Sure, but there are plenty of other players in the market that traditionally have been able to shave a lot more from investors. Yes, it is not the biggest rip off the world (or indeed the equity market) has ever seen. That doesn't change anything about its fundamental nature, however. >As for your comments that HFT is not driving down spreads, there are plenty of evidence that they do. Spreads have collapsed to nothing in the 15-20 years of operating HFTs. Spread have declined because electronic trading reduced the transaction costs of trading. It ought to be glaringly obvious that anything that happened 20 years ago had NOTHING to do with HFT. It didn't even exist in a limited form until 15 years ago and only really took off 5 years ago.