It&#x27;s amazing to me that people get so worked up about HFT when the same arguments apply to 90% of &quot;tech&quot; companies.<p>&gt; Are the people writing these algorithms even remotely thinking that the trades can ruin or starve millions ?<p>No they can&#x27;t, by definition, high frequency trades have very small price deltas and each one matters very very little to the broader market.<p>An abstract way to think of HFT is that it condenses money out of information. This is exactly what ad-driven businesses like Google and Facebook do too, but HFT doesn&#x27;t require massive databases of information about all of us, plus it is more energy efficient because it doesn&#x27;t have to send the same copy of a cat GIF over the air to 350 million people just to make half a cent in ad sales.