Comment by traderthrow454

I think thats an overly simplistic view of things. The market is big and many participants trade at different frequencies. Large pension funds need liquidity to move big blocks of stock for their quarterly and monthly rebalances, and the big medium term statistical arbitrage traders provide liquidity for them to do so. HFT players provide liquidity for the stat arb players. The classes of participants with different frequencies actually help one another, while there is competition for alpha within strategies with similar holding periods. Overall the system creates an extremely efficient and liquid system for valuing and exchanging equity - the very system that empowers YCombinator and other Venture investors to make VC investments knowing that their winners will eventually IPO or be bought by public companies.