So, you want everyone to trade only daily or weekly or quarterly?
Thinks of it like this. When I put in a trade at human speeds based on business fundamentals, I'm not looking that the millisecond by millisecond prices, I just put in a price I am willing to accept and if the market reaches that price I get execution. HFT makes that easier and more efficient across markets by ensuring prices are converged rapidly.
How do you think it makes it harder or worse? If I put in an order to buy at $x on a particular market because I think the stock is worth more than that for business reasons, what is it about the existence of HFT that is a problem for me?
Disagree? You think milliseconds is “better” somehow?
Then by that logic microseconds are better still! (A straight-faced argument made by thousands of HFT people.)
Then, surely, nanoseconds matter. Again, some traders care deeply about shaving single digit “nanos” off their response times by using smart NICs that can respond before the incoming packet has even finished arriving! Bypassing the CPU entirely because ermahgerd that would waste precious nanos!
Okay, what about femtoseconds? Attoseconds? Low single digit Plank time units?
Clearly the extrapolation is nonsense.
The problem is that there’s always an advantage to some rent-seeker to be faster than everyone else, so there will never be consensus between them and the general public. Or each other.
It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
This is why laws are required, to prevent that one greedy guy putting “just one more cow” onto the pasture than the other greedy guys.
Open an order book. Prices and quantities aren’t decoration; they’re live telemetry for supply, demand, and how tight the crowd’s consensus is at each level. That’s information, full stop.
A human (or machine) trader forms a view of fair value against that tape. The book helps decide how to trade—size, urgency, venue—regardless of motive: arbitrage, hedge, speculation, investment, cash-out. Intent doesn’t change the math.
Prints are messages. Every execution updates everyone else’s priors. More prints → more information → smoother discovery.
Make the book sparse—only a handful of trades per day—and watch confidence collapse. With weaker consensus and wider error bars, people step back. Liquidity thins, friction rises. That’s not morality; that’s microstructure.
Time horizon doesn’t invalidate the signal. A strategy that unfolds over days and one that resolves in milliseconds both add to the dataset. If it trades, it teaches. More resolution in others’ behavior means better prices and deeper books. That’s the game.
It is not clear to me that the only economically productive information is "information about companies or economic fundamentals."
If I know some idiot is willing to pay 100x what a company is actually worth, that is economically productive because it gives me, someone better with money, a ton of resources that formerly were controlled by someone who didn't know how to leverage the assets in an economically productive manner. IT's the same argument as allowing adverse possession: transfer of assets from non-productive owners to productive owners, benefiting society as a whole.
With this, I've established a third kind of data beyond "economic fundamentals" and "information about companies."
We have some convenient "lines in the sand" that we can use as a guide:
- To make trading fair globally, the round-trip time for light around the planet could be multiplied a couple of times. That's about a second.
- The fastest possible time a human can parse the meaning of a long headline (not the full news article!) is... about a second.
- Nobody in their right mind should be buying any significant volume of shares without double-checking their order. There's no way to do this even vaguely carefully in under... a second.
Etc...
Bots trading faster than a second are trading with each other, and the only signals they have are each other.
Humans are what markets are for, not bots.
This reminds me of a story from WWII where a bunch of generals took a holiday at the same time, leaving a junior general in charge. He was in a bit of a panic because he was expecting to be overloaded with work... but found it easy. The generals were making work for each other by requesting reports, organising meetings with each other, etc...
Bots make work for bots, they generate signals for bots ever faster, to be processed by faster bots still, etc...
It's just... nonsense. Zero real information is being generated, they're just "riffing" off of the much less frequent human-initiated trades, all of which take minutes to organise and execute with due diligence.
It's like being asked to write a 10-page essay on a three-line poem.
a) https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.90b.1?lang=bi&with=Introd...
Or, maybe your strategy doesn't make money when you can trade once per minute, but does at a higher frequency.
What is fair about saying someone has to have 100x the capital to participate? You are focusing only on one dimension of cost, when there are several.