It does seem like an incredible waste of resources of all kinds, but I'm not sure whether a tax would fix things.
This is a problem of market structures, if I understand it correctly; facilitated largely by Reg NMI in the US and its equivalents globally. And it's not like all was well before that: Instead of HFTs, it was market makers or specialists pocketing impressive, largely risk-free profits.
What you'd ideally want is to preserve the good that the HFTs facilitate (liquidity, more efficient price discovery, smaller spreads etc.) while avoiding the bad (siphoning off investors' money from the markets and math and physics PhDs from the world's top schools), but I haven't yet heard a convincing proposal for that.
This is a problem of market structures, if I understand it correctly; facilitated largely by Reg NMI in the US and its equivalents globally. And it's not like all was well before that: Instead of HFTs, it was market makers or specialists pocketing impressive, largely risk-free profits.
What you'd ideally want is to preserve the good that the HFTs facilitate (liquidity, more efficient price discovery, smaller spreads etc.) while avoiding the bad (siphoning off investors' money from the markets and math and physics PhDs from the world's top schools), but I haven't yet heard a convincing proposal for that.