Millions of trades a day each contain teensy, tiny little updates about the state of the economy.  Think of them like tweets, not like State of the Union addresses.  This married couple wants to send their daughter to college more than they want Google.  That hedge fund likes Coke more than Apple.  This pension fund doing it&#x27;s weekly buy of an index to prepare for 2075.<p>The market is these little packets bouncing off each other and summarized.  High numbers of them are not unhealthy.  On the contrary, it means more information is moving with less overhead loss to middlemen.  (By analogy: What&#x27;s more expensive, 100k tweets, 10 phone calls, or a FedEx envelope?  If you say &quot;clearly it&#x27;s the tweets because there are so darn many&quot; that would be a weird answer for an engineer to believe.)<p>If you believe the world economy is going to heck in a hand basket, there exist ways for you to be richly compensated for that expert opinion by sending your tweets into the machine.  (Well, if you&#x27;re proven right.) HFTs will happily minimize the transactional costs you incur while making that statement, as compared to the sweaty, yelling colluding-against-you jocks they have replaced.