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To play devil's advocate:

- Can't failures be counteracted by having failsafe measures? For example, if the market goes down more than 5% in a few-minute period, the market temporarily shuts down for a cooloff period of several hours to diagnose what's happening.

- Isn't HFT irrelevant to long term investment, given that it erodes away short-term profit, leading to accurate pricing of the stock?

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Good questions.

A failsafe/circuit breaker is a possibility but shutting down the market will affect confidence. I'd prefer to see a market operate on a tick basis I.e all trades for a tick are transacted in one go with a window between each tick and assertions before and after the tick processing.

Fair point with your second comment.

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