[bitanarch]

Imagine someone outside of the tech community thinking along this line...

"Making high performance CPUs that are also highly power efficient should make a ton of money. Why isn't everyone doing it?"

Well, turns out that isn't exactly something that a small group of engineers can whip up in a garage anymore. Same goes for highly efficient market making systems.

[rgifford]

CPUs operate due to quantified phenomenon. They're well understood. They've been refined over nearly 100 years.

HFTs came into their own over the past decade or so -- during a time of falling interest rates, unprecedented growth, and notable lack of regulation in financial markets.

One of these things is not like the other. I'd be entirely unsurprised to see most HFTs turn out like Lehman Brothers, Enron, or AIG. They all lasted more than a decade or so. But their gains were fraudulent and they failed spectacularly.

[vecter]

HFT does nothing illegal. If you’re going to make strong claims like that, it would be good to provide some evidence.

[carnitine]

How exactly would this fraud work? Most HFT firms only trade their own capital and distribute gains internally, there’s no one to defraud. Also it’s been going on a lot longer than a decade.

[noitpmeder]

   {x} came into their own over the past decade or so, during a time of falling interest rates, unprecedented growth, and notable lack of regulation in {x's field}.

You can say this about a lot of companies today.