I've never liked this explanation because most HFT is just front-running. The liquidity is there already, they're just shaving their cut off the top in most cases because they can move faster than everyone else.
It's kind of weird that people have such strong opinions about things they know very little about.
When I looked up the stock, (I think the stock was very expensive), trading volume was like 1 Share every 6 months or so. Yes, I guess you could call this "very low" trading volume. So where would HTF come in here?
By the way, since the tremendous inflow of cash into index ETF, some stocks are bascially traded only by ETFs and HTF without many other market participants. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-04-09/horseman-global-un...
For most securities, there are very few natural buyers and sellers of a security, so they would find it very hard to transact without an intermediary market maker.
All electronic market makers are HFTers compared to regular market participants, but they run a very diverse set of strategies, with some operating at much closer to human speeds when compared to the fastest of the bunch.
Market makers provide better price and execution than traditional human market makers, and are a net positive to the market ecosystem, at least in regards to retail investors (the institional traders do sometimes get fucked).
Strategies that had less efficacy at $100mm position sizes now can scale to $10bn position sizes.
I like the growth of liquidity.
This is categorically not what HFT firms are doing.