I hear a lot of complaining about the HFT business, and there is plenty to complain about, but I think every so often we need to take a step back and remember what the alternative is: Insular, inefficient, corrupt, pit-based trading.

We now complain about a few pennies being scraped off of each order, which stings a little, but read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator to get some context about the dollars that used to be scraped off of each order by pit traders. Today, if you're trading a low dollar stock like Bank of America or Zynga, the vast majority of the money you're giving up to make a trade goes to brokerage, rather than to market makers like Getco.

Where computers are involved in trading, there will always be an edge to be gained from writing better, faster programs. We can take some steps to de-emphasize making programs that have a speed advantage (e.g. assign random latencies to all entered orders, or to bring all orders in each stock to trade on a single, specially-designated exchange), but I'll take computers over pit traders any day.