HFT's providing Liquidity

I'm sure the computer algorithm did some research on Ford, looked at its finances, upcoming product lines, employee relations, etc. and decided that its prospect for sustained growth and returns in the near and long term looked promising and decided to invest its money in the company in that 80 milliseconds.  Because that's what the stock market's for, right?  Linking up investors with money with companies seeking capital.  Just because HTF pay for special access to the exchanges so they can get their trades in before everyone else doesn't make it shady at all...  

This has been happening since the stock markets opened.  It's not new.  It happened in open outcry as well.  Doesn't necessarily make it ok of course.

This is of course a microscopic example of trading not being a level playing field, but I'm equally as convinced that the same crap goes on over much longer periods of time.

I've gone on and on about the market being rigged and the "buy and hold" method of long ago just isn't a realistic method for investing anymore.  Things like this just reinforce my beliefs.  :-/

I guess you could "kind of" throw me into this bucket because the market trends up and down so consistently that I make weekly swing trades based on the up and down swings using option contracts to leverage the return 100:1.

I don't care if the market is going up or down, I just like it to consistently swing as it's doing it.

It's certainly not a manipulation thing on my part because there are thousands of people that do this type of trading, but it's completely indifferent of company value and growth.  It's all about technical swings on the market.

Yeah, I typically have less than $2500 at a time of actual cash tied up in my individual swing trades.  Due to them being option trades I get huge profit swings on that money, but I think I'm less than a spec of sand in the overall option market.  :-D

HFT provides a liquid market only when it suits HFT traders.  When something goes down and they get out the resulting market impact is huge.  If you've got orders in there with stop losses, you're getting sold, yet you might find the price return in a few seconds.  This is what happened on the NYSE a couple of years ago.  

So the HFT claims are true but not complete - the real problem is they're not obligated to be there all the time.  Then again, even paid for market makers only have to be making prices 90% of the time so plenty of wiggle room to get out in times of strife.

It's not illegal and it's not against exchange rules to get access to information faster than others as long as everybody has the opportunity to get access to that data (if they can afford it).  Some of the ways that data is subsequently used may be against the rules (spoofing, layering).  But even then, those terms are not clearly defined (no point, technology moves too fast to make a definition workable) that it's hard to pin someone down.