> And every time a trade happens you run the risk of getting clipped by the faster guys who see you coming.
I think it is natural, but fallacious, to apply line-of-sight properties to trading. If you plan to trade, then there are two ways that another participant can "see you coming":
1. If you don't have direct market access, your order gets routed through a broker. The broker sees your order before it hits the market, and if he jumps in line ahead of you then that is front-running, and a Bad Thing. Your broker can get in a lot of trouble for this sort of thing.
2. If you are trying to move a large position by sending multiple orders to the market (one after another), then all market participants have the chance to react to the first order. It's really a game to try to move a lot of inventory at once, without tipping your hand to anyone else in the room. Thems the breaks.
Nobody else gets to see anyone's order before the matching engine has already processed it, so there's no way to jump "ahead" of it.
OTOH, maybe your long-term investor is trying to time the market: wait for a signal intraday, and pick that moment to send an order. In that case, if it is a good intraday signal then it is likely that someone else will compete. It is unlikely for a long-term trader to have spent as much on infrastructure as a HF trader, so the juicy signals will result in missed executions that _look_ like front-running.