It&#x27;s not hard to see who benefits from these taxes. You avoid the tax by trading a swap&#x2F;CFD&#x2F;forward (outside the U.S., if necessary). This means that your market maker is a bank instead of an HFT firm. More of the order flow becomes internalized so there&#x27;s less incentive to post competitive quotes on public exchanges. I think it&#x27;s very telling that many of the articles talk about the evils of HFT without addressing internalization.<p>It&#x27;s true that this type of tax can easily be avoided, but the real problem is that it incentivizes trading to move from public exchanges to banks&#x27; walled gardens.