this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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From my understanding of HFT, what they're effectively doing is automated front runnings.
They scan market activity and look for spreads between orders and availability. Then they place very short term orders any time they see, for instance, "I'll sell 1000 X at $49" and "I'll buy 500 X at $49.05", effectively buying up all the outstanding $49 orders and flipping them for a $.05 profit.
You don't need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.
Because getting out ahead of trade volume is so lucrative, you'll see huge investments in rack space near the physical stock exchanges and high speed lines between cities with big brokerages.
But AI trading is (theoretically) about spotting and predicting long term trends in the market, not front running active trades.
That's how big hedge funds fuck everyone. They have that access.
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.