Look, HFT as a concept is already black magic to people who trade.<p>It&#x27;s a fundamentally simple idea but when you actually try to apply it to a real living breathing market, it becomes indistinguishable from electronic warfare because that&#x27;s what it is!<p>A lot of the shenanigans that people point to are just different techniques to try and suss out the market microstructure and are in effect no different from trading techniques that evolved in the 1920s.<p>The best HFT book I ever read was &quot;Reminiscences of a Stock Operator&quot; because if you look at what he&#x27;s saying and then replace the people in the book with electronic agents, you end up right where we are with HFT.