Maybe you should do some research before you just mouth off about something you obviously have no clue about. Not only have several academic studies proven the value of high-frequency trading to liquidity and improvements in market structure (Smith, Brogaard), but the common misconception that it was HFT that caused the flash crash has been shown to be false. why don't you investigate what spreads were before HFT, and tell me why it's better for people to pay $0.05/share after decimilization, or 12.5 cents/share before it? Or maybe you can just google HFT, and copy and paste the first thing that you find. Oh wait, you already did that.