HFT needs to be outlawed.

No exchange should allow trades to complete, I would argue in any time less than 15 minutes, and each trade should have a random 1-15 minute delay pad on top of that.

The HFT access only serve the larger financial firms, and are used to do frontloading and other basically-illegal tricks. It provides anti-competitive advantage to large firms for markets that are supposed to open access/fair trading. And of course it leads to AI autotrading madness.

I get that it keeps a lot of tech people very well compensated, but it is either in the service of unregulated fraud at worst and unfair advantage at best.