Idk if I’d say they “fuck everyone” given how much of the market is already heavily concentrated in a handful of hedge funds and investment banks. Most people don’t have real exposure to the stock market. And of those who do, most don’t indulge in active trading - they have savings in a 401k that maps to an index fund or other basket of blue chips, updating on daily or quarterly cycle.
The folks the HFT really fuck over are the day traders and investment bankers who are, themselves, trying to rapidly reposition ahead of market data. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire team loses more to HFTers in a day than any lay citizen would lose in a lifetime.
Institutional Investors (such as Pension Funds) and Retail are the ones getting properly fleeced in present day markets.
Retail might have started to get wise on it (frankly I don’t know for sure if that’s the case, as Retail tend to be either naive amateurs or deluded fools, so I’m just trusting what you said on this), but when it comes to Pension Funds people only figure out they’ve been fucked decades later when they try and cash their pensions and it’s a lot more difficult to tease away how it happened when all the money is pretty much in an investment black-box than it is from watching a handful of stocks and ETFs one has invested directly in.
Idk if I’d say they “fuck everyone” given how much of the market is already heavily concentrated in a handful of hedge funds and investment banks. Most people don’t have real exposure to the stock market. And of those who do, most don’t indulge in active trading - they have savings in a 401k that maps to an index fund or other basket of blue chips, updating on daily or quarterly cycle.
The folks the HFT really fuck over are the day traders and investment bankers who are, themselves, trying to rapidly reposition ahead of market data. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire team loses more to HFTers in a day than any lay citizen would lose in a lifetime.
Institutional Investors (such as Pension Funds) and Retail are the ones getting properly fleeced in present day markets.
Retail might have started to get wise on it (frankly I don’t know for sure if that’s the case, as Retail tend to be either naive amateurs or deluded fools, so I’m just trusting what you said on this), but when it comes to Pension Funds people only figure out they’ve been fucked decades later when they try and cash their pensions and it’s a lot more difficult to tease away how it happened when all the money is pretty much in an investment black-box than it is from watching a handful of stocks and ETFs one has invested directly in.