Opinion: Rationalizing Latency Competition in High-Frequency Trading

What I took away from this, and I could be wrong.

Latency is bad for the market because of speculative investment to make money on the trade itself. Not on the deeper fundamentals. We need HFT to smooth the market out for (because?) these types of trades.

I am fascinated that they chose to lead with an example that included futures however. I am reminded of why you cant buy an onion future... I get the point for farmed goods, but why stock futures (out side speculation).