What value does HFT create?
HFT provides liquidity which reduces everyone else's cost and/or exposure to short term risk. Low-latency trading though costs everyone. Nobody actually needs anything faster than a fill in a blink of an eye. The only people who think they do really need smarter match engines or to stop taking advantage of people
If anyone knows of good high-level reading material on the subject, I'd appreciate a link so I can spare you more dumb questions.
I admit to having drunk some of Mark Cuban's Kool-Aid, as well as Jon Stewart's and that of some other liberal sources. Their argument, as far as I understand, is that HFT doesn't provide value proportionate with that which it extracts from a system designed to connect investors with entrepreneurs.
The idea has an appealing simplicity, especially given recent history, but don't know very much about markets, so I thought I'd ask people on the other side of the debate for their take.