> The purpose of the "speed" is to elicit information. Not quite. HFT uses information that you probably don't have, and acts on that information using softwa

> The purpose of the "speed" is to elicit information. Not quite. HFT uses information that you probably don't have, and acts on that information using software and hardware that you probably don't have[0]. You can obtain that information and that software/hardware - it's just expensive (high barrier to entry)[1]. As explained above, HFT exists because portions of the market are not perfectly competitive in the economic sense[2], but that's always been the case (and arguably was more so before the advent of computerized HFT). [0] It's not so much that you don't have the information - it's that the latency is too high for most players. [1] At least some portion of these costs are very real - the cost of maintaining low-latency connections between exchanges, colocating hardware, etc. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition