At the end of the day talking about HFT this way is to not know what they do and what service they offer to the market. Overall they are not trending makers but trend followers.
Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale
Even if the HFT market is 100 times the smallest estimate, it's still a relatively small portion of the world economy, which is approximately $100 trillion. HFT is a fascinating intersection of finance/C++/JVM for competitive super-nerds. It happens to add liquidity to the market, as far as I understand. I am not demonizing it in any way.
However, it's not a significant portion of the US or global economy by any stretch. The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point.
>"The argument over whether it sets or follows stock prices is mostly philosophical at this point."
Sure, I respect that!