The First High-Frequency Trader

I stopped at "Perhaps the best description of the rigged game HFT’s play comes from the book..."

Just because they aren't guaranteeing your execution price when you trade in larger size blocks doesn't mean the game is rigged. This has been discussed to death. Sure, a few bad apples used the technology for frontrunning, but then we have a frontrunning problem, not an HFT problem.

Furthermore, just like the stat arb strategies of the past that eventually expanded beyond Wall St into everyday retail and online analytics, HFT strategies may be hard to understand but it's not like this is some mafia forcing you to pay a toll to trade... it's far, far more nuanced.

This is so broken. The author describes front-running and then goes on to conflate that with arbitrage. Those aren't the same thing! The only thing the author gets right is that neither are a consequence of HFT, they can happen at any trading-speed granularity. Further, there is absolutely nothing unfair about arbitrage. Every-time you go to a store and think "I saw this cheaper at a different store, I should buy it there instead", you're also doing a form arbitrage. Arbitrage synchronizes prices. The arbiter earns the price spread as a reward for moving the prices into alignment.