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HFT extracts the value from transactions. It won't extract the value from a company becoming twice as valuable.

Invest because you think the company is going to be successful and thus more valuable. The actual amount of stock that is HFT traded is tiny relative for each company, long term price is driven by what institutional investors are willing to pay for actual percentages of a company.

Why are the other people creating value, while HFT traders do not? Both types of players extract value from the market, while improving market efficiency.

HFT definitely has high entry costs (10's of millions of dollars), and firms that aren't serious about HFT can't participate. Note that HFT only makes 2 billion a year, so they aren't actually missing out on that much. HFT just isn't a very big space, compared to long term investing, and doesn't represent very much movement of capital. (The wealthy don't really invest in HFT, since HFT firms generally don't accept outside capital, or need any substantial amount of capital to operate)

>Strikes me that HFT is extracting value from the market. The prices are usually relatively stable they're increasing the draw of money away from smaller traders but also removing value overall (in the form of money) from the system and not adding much value.

Can you explain how that works?