I'm not a professional trader, like yourself, but from what I've gathered over the last several years of HFT coming up in the news is that it is in fact a low-barrier to entry field. All you need is a decent quant, application designer, and some co-located machines as close as you can get them (and other easily acquired amenities.) So I could make a reasonable bet you could open a HFT firm with a couple hundred thousand, plus the talent. (And I've confirmed this with a few hedge fund guys, and they pretty much agreed.)

And I do completely understand the argument for liquidity: more transactions = more accurate price discovery. But I think problem here is that this entire field is black box, meaning property trading algorithms and trading patterns can and are used within the system. This can allow a trading AI to go out into the market place, look for pattens, and to create and cancel millions of orders within the fraction of a second.

I'm sure you know about the former Goldman Sachs programmer who was charged with theft by the FBI. It was totaled at around 32 megabytes of software code. Not very much. But Goldman insisted that if this code got out into the market it would be detrimental to their business and violate their trades secrets confidentiality clause. Not to mention Goldman's largest profit center in their business is their proprietary trading desk, which is heavily into HFT.

My contention is that if we are really interested in a utility that uniformly benefits the market, then let's have an open source platform that provides that, so we can verify that any of these firms aren't "front-running" their trades.

Thats my opinion. I think a lot of the debate over HFT is just filler, it doesn't matter. The guys who are hip to the scene are already making a killing on it now, and it may last a few more years before we begin to regulate.