Electronic trading is the present, and it should be the future.
You know HFT isn't identical to any electronic exchange, right. I haven't evaluated in great depth whether Lewis is correct or not. But I'm pretty sure you can't defend HFT solely on the basis of "this is inevitable" (after all exchanges makes elaborate and special allowances for HFT, it's not a strategy you can sit at home and do). Any market is based on rules. If, for example, every transaction, no matter how quick or small, involved a small fee, I don't think HFT could exist as it does now.
Again, the point isn't that I've prove HFT should be banned but rather that like any other construct, it needs to justify it's existence rather than talk about inevitability - sort of like you defend patents if you want but you can't defend based on property rights.
Every transaction does have a small fee. In US equities, there is an SEC fee of 22.1 dollars per million dollars sold, and for most (all?) futures exchanges, where HFT is just as prevalent, there is a fee both for both sides of a trade (unlike the maker/taker model in US equities).
I have not seen any reasonable way to decouple having a speed advantage from electronic trading. IEX is a large step backwards towards closed networks of non-public markets.
You know HFT isn't identical to any electronic exchange, right. I haven't evaluated in great depth whether Lewis is correct or not. But I'm pretty sure you can't defend HFT solely on the basis of "this is inevitable" (after all exchanges makes elaborate and special allowances for HFT, it's not a strategy you can sit at home and do). Any market is based on rules. If, for example, every transaction, no matter how quick or small, involved a small fee, I don't think HFT could exist as it does now.
Again, the point isn't that I've prove HFT should be banned but rather that like any other construct, it needs to justify it's existence rather than talk about inevitability - sort of like you defend patents if you want but you can't defend based on property rights.