That's what I've always thought as well. We have large numbers of very intelligent people dedicating all their efforts to playing games with the values of real companies. It seems like a massive waste of talent IMHO.
Is this comment real? You made this comment on a site that most people use to waste time, and where one of the top posts is an Assembly implementation of Flappy Bird.
Fun fact: HFT has an annual revenue ~1/50th[1][2] of Google's. What's worse: a few hundred people wasting their time moving prices of select stocks a few pennies, or several thousand wasting their time collecting scary amounts of data about you to try and get you to click an ad?
