They said the same thing about the mortgage market abuses - "Oh, it's just a few bad apples." No. No it fucking isn't. Furthermore, letting the bad behavior go

They said the same thing about the mortgage market abuses - "Oh, it's just a few bad apples." No. No it fucking isn't. Furthermore, letting the bad behavior go unpunished means the 'good' behavior gets driven out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law "Good" HFT strategies are nowadays obvious by one very salient fact: they're not very profitable. Most market making now, for instance, is simply cover - noise trading, basically - designed to disguise the real bad behavior (that the OP conveniently states is just 'very rare'... heh). HFTs aren't dumb. They know that any regulator or prosecutor will find it very hard to dig through the trading data and discern evidence of illegal behavior from individual trades.