Maybe it made things worse for some traders. I didn't notice anything bad happening lately. Certainly trading is not harder than it was say 5 years ago. Volatility and liquidity changes, but that's all I noticed.
Frankly if algos affected something that's most likely breakouts and "flash crashes" getting STRONGER, not weaker.
It only tells you those traders are unable to trade them. Nothing else. As for "researchers" I don't even treat them seriously, cause they obviously have very superficial understanding of TA trading.
There you go! Excel is trader's best friend! And that's exactly where most people start to stumble in their career: hours and hours, endless hours of very boring home work, often leading to nothing... then back to the blackboard and... hours and hours again. But that's "how traders really work", unlike "catch a happy trade, get rich quick" dilettante mentality.
I know a few personal stories about SCALPERS being affected. But they basically compete in the same niche, so no wonder. If you ask any successful day trader (shooting for intra-day swings of more than just a few ticks), doubt result will be the same. I don't even know when and where HFT steps in, who cares? Trades are still trades, signals are signals. It's not even interesting to me who's that moving the market in the "now" - human or algo. One sure thing I have never witnessed or experienced in live trading, but always hear on the Internet is 1-10 contract pikers complaining HFT and stop hunters are all the way after them. But my psychology background of course tell me that's the way to rationalize...
Now I am really confused... How can HFT even get noticed by INVESTOR who by definition steps in for a long-term so that a few ticks back or forth are nothing for the strategy?
It would be an interesting study to see (maybe it exists) how success rate of newbie traders changed today vs. 80's and 90's. Have a feeling it wasn't so much more winners back then, despite no HFT.