That's what I've always thought as well. We have large numbers of very intelligent people dedicating all their efforts to playing games with the values of real companies. It seems like a massive waste of talent IMHO.
Fun fact: HFT has an annual revenue ~1/50th[1][2] of Google's. What's worse: a few hundred people wasting their time moving prices of select stocks a few pennies, or several thousand wasting their time collecting scary amounts of data about you to try and get you to click an ad?
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading#Market_s...