I hope society can only gain in the long run from the HFT revolution. Technologies developed during the arms race will be eventually put to civil use, we won't use lasers for star wars but instead retired combatives will watch blue ray DVDs. Competition will eventually force brokers to start offering their currently private algos to you and me. Not merely price-impact ones like VWAP, but perhaps the more aggresive ones as well. After all, how come IB can boast about those industry-leading fills improved over NBBO? Surely it is at the cost of "bad" fills for someone using other brokers with "less smart" routing... What happens if those "lame" brokers start commissioning algos specifically designed to seek price improvement and offer these to the public as standard limit orders, with the rapid fire machine discreetly tucked away under the bonnet? Won't we all become HFT traders then? Won't our brokers respective edges cancel each other out in the long run? I enjoyed this thread enormously, for the same reason that I enjoy markets: uncovering the hidden structure. It was all about establishing the pecking order, resume- and size-swinging. It yielded the usual technical detail, straight from the pro's mouth as it were (Rodney and Dinn won IMO - they can peck anyone here