This is the free market speaking. If there was one exchange there would be ~no~ less latency arbitrage. But there are many... Which creates a competitive landscape and reduces fees for investors. The by product is you have many HFTs that come in to take advantage of mispricings, even if they are on sub millisecond scales. It doesn't harm the company or the investor. Its quite the opposite... Investors benefit from competition amongst exchanges and HFTs.

In addition you have redundancy in the markets system. Exchanges are important for national security... Having everything centralized would risk people's retirements, savings, and more

The issue isn't that there's a lot of change coming from inside the markets, it's that there's a lot of change coming from outside the market, and it's all interconnected.

So, you want everyone to trade only daily or weekly or quarterly?

Except for the fact that people don’t know what the price is even with all available knowledge. HFTs serve a pretty useful function in converging to a discovered price the market can bear continuously. Prior to HFT markets were generally less stable on their pricing and liquidity was much worse. The fact you can basically trade at any time on anything instantly is made possible by HFT.

I look at them as providing a service like an energy exchange does in ensuring power distributes evenly and regularly across a region across providers and grids. They clip a fee in the middle but they provide a service in stable supply and prices.

This doesn’t mean automation isn’t without risk, and like an energy exchange, when things go badly they can go very badly. But by and large you never notice either the HFT or the energy exchange while you benefit from their existence.

The fact that people make money off of HFT by definition means that the market conditions have changed in those time frames.

hah someone finally said it. The financial market or whatever the f it's called has become a Monty Python sketch. Like those "pro" StarCraft gamers that keep randomly clicking their mouse for no reason except to keep their APM counter high.