High-frequency trading considered harmful

Trade fees are ludicrously low. There's no fee or limit on adding nonsense orders to the order books, much less using them to probe what the exchange and/or the other HFTs may or may not be up to.

Also, nobody has yet managed to explain why such liquidity must necessarily occur in microseconds instead of, say, seconds. Or even minutes. "I make money by arbitraging between Frankfurt, London and NYC one millisecond faster than the other guy" (don't see many gals in that space …) is not an endeavor that should be rewarded in a sane economic system IMHO, and I for one won't spend any effort to help those people make even more play money.

Worse: said play money doesn't grow on trees. Ultimately, it's siphoned off from all those who think owning a couple stocks is a good idea but don't have the $$$ to participate in the HFT game. You want to buy for $10 and sell for $20? not if the HFT thing notices. It'll buy for 10.01 and sell for 19.99, leaving $.02 margin for you instead of $10.

Yes I'm exaggerating, and I skipped a couple of levels between the retail stock owner and the HF trader, but WAY not as much as I wish I were.