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> (in fact, it extracts that value from non-HFT traders, so even those are shafted here).

in return HFT provides liquidity (and by that smaller spreads) to the market, I would think.

If you ever bought or sold a stock with a market order, you profited from the work the HFT is doing.

> it's a work that does no useful work in any meaningful sense, but serves to make some already fabulously rich people even richer

Isn't Robinhood able to offer free trading to customers solely because they sell their order flow on to, among others, HFT firms?[0]

The abstraction of "society", that is presumably supposed to benefit from everyone's job, is hiding the crucial details.

His job facilitates trades between people who want to trade with each other. Since they are part of society, our society benefits from his work.

Evidently it's doing more than "make some already fabulously rich people even richer", because it's paying salaries for some programmers, as well.