Nah .. It's more like: - The last burger was bought for $1.00. - You get to the front of the line, and bid $0.99 for the next burger. - The chick at the register gets pissed, she's about to end shift and doesn't have time for this crap. She doesn't want to hold up the line, so eventually, she crosses the spread, comes to you and fills your order at $0.99. (Muppet). - You then take the burger to the back of the line and offer it to some impatient dude at $1.01. Made yourself a 2c spread.
Hmm, not really. The quotes I posted were passive, so I'd call it market making. Burger liquidity provision even.
Here's a nice example today of massive quote stuffing in PRSS. There were 80k quotes in 5 seconds. PRSS hardly trades so these guys were slowing quotes in other stocks on the same server to gain advantage over other hft's. This is quote manipulation in it's finest, the SEC just doesn't have the intelligence to crack down on it.
High Frequency Traders And Current Market Structures Penalize Investors http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroe...current-market-structures-penalize-investors/
For anyone interested I recently posted a couple of interesting research papers which explain the scope of High Frequency Trading. http://tradersplace.net/index.php?do=/forum/thread/8/hft-basics/view_13//t_1358502879/
http://www.amazon.com/The-Problem-H...keywords=The+Problem+of+HFT#reader_1481978357 Free chapter. I'm proud to say I called it years ago, and recognized the shill apologist scum here for what they were.