Small investors can only buy on bad news and long where applicable (i.e good company). Bad news and poor technical performance even if for a period is guaranteed almost to be driven down by HFT. And sometimes HFT over does it (maybe on purpose to let the suckers flood back in). I.e. Apple going to 430, Netflix to mid 50s after similar shorts/run ups and battle of machines.

We all will be using HFT soon via proxy or already are. I would say this, possibly in the long run it is better as there will always be HFT algorithms that buy on the dip and take into account technical input as well as human input. Humans are irrational but machines only take a part of that into the algorithm, relying heavily on technicals, futures and news in addition.

But there will also be massive shorting efforts as this used to be a tenured skill, but now a machine can match anyone on shorting. Flash crashes are now always possible but also recover quickly. The only way to change this is to charge more for trades and throttles, then there will always be inequality there as well. This also sort of lessens run away bull runs as well as the machines will always pull back first or buy first if past thresholds are met and futures line up.

> Small investors can only buy on bad news and long where applicable (i.e good company). Bad news and poor technical performance even if for a period is guaranteed almost to be driven down by HFT. And sometimes HFT over does it (maybe on purpose to let the suckers flood back in). I.e. Apple going to 430, Netflix to mid 50s after similar shorts/run ups and battle of machines.

I think Apple's a weird case. They had a "down" quarter, which caused the tech analysts to go all crazy and claim that Apple's a sell. So that caused people to sell, which drove down the price, and dropping below 500 probably triggered a lot of people's stop loss strategies, which drove down the price even more...

That's not a weird case, that's fairly classic (though utterly irrational) market behaviour.

apple will go lower in the next 12 months, and it has nothing to do with HFT

I agree that corruption is the larger and possibly more pressing issue, but that doesn't seem to be what happened here. I could be wrong of course, but this seems like a technical flaw and not intentional.

Oh no. I definitely don't mean to imply that corruption was involved here.