The stock market provides an efficient medium for the allocation of capital. This means that corporations can more easily and safely raise capital from the public and that the public can participate in the positive-sum growth of publicly traded companies and the economy at large. Moreover, the stock market, like any market efficient enough to be worth its salt, provides a uniquely effective information aggregation mechanism via price discovery, facilitating more accurate and more precise forecasting and prediction for nearly any process which interacts with the greater economy.
Studies of high-frequency trading have yet to show benefits to these processes above and beyond those provided by a slower static tick rate, and in fact, more recent studies seem to suggest that HFT may even exist only to the detriment of these processes, all while wasting undue resources, both physical and intellectual, on an endless arms race over ever decreasing trading latency[1].