This Is What One Half Second of High Speed Trading Looks Like
If we eventually decide that all of this ridiculously fast bid/offer blitzing by our HFT overlords is a destabilization risk to the economy [1], couldn't we start taxing these transactions, or the bids/offers themselves?  This level of high-frequency noise being thrown into the market can't reasonably go on increasing forever, right... at some point we just bury ourselves in a never-ending war of inscrutable, difficult to predict machine trading algorithms, and nobody will be able to translate market movements into anything linkable to reality, right [2]?   Shouldn't either market operators or the government at some point in the future start dialing back the traffic with penalties on the sheer number of actions taken?... or is that just an insane non-starter, since it affects too many rich people in the finance sector and their colleagues rotating through the current regulatory structure?I think it's an interesting long-term problem faced by society to decide whether we are OK with investment markets becoming completely impossible for "normal", human investors to navigate.  It's already rapidly going that way--the capability to profit is already wildly tilted toward firms that act at HFT volume.  If a poker site became overrun by bots to the extent that it was no longer fun for humans to play, they would fight back against the bots (as most do to some degree).  But with investments... we may be getting to the point where the average day trader needs a 3000U server farm to compete effectively, and then I question whether we've lost sight of why we subsidize and spend money regulating that market at all.  It's like a chess league where the grandmasters get to use computers as aids, and the newcomers have to play blindfolded.[1] Nothing catastrophic has happened yet, but there have been a few flash crashes that have necessitated trading to be shut down, and having to "roll back" trades is never perfectly equitable and only decreases confidence in a market.[2] Some of those flash crashes were traced back to one overzealous seller that threw HFT's for a loop (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash -- it is quite interesting).  I shudder to think of a day when the market fluctuates wildly and the data is literally too complicated for regulators to trace it back to any identifiable cause.  That day is closer than anybody in finance is likely to acknowledge.