Articles like this are so mind-numbingly frustrating because they completely muddle the water for any reasoned debate about the true advantages and disadvantages of high frequency trading.

> Wall Street has developed a new way, clouded in obscurity, to fleece the hundreds of millions of Americans who have money invested in company pension plans, mutual funds and insurance policies.

Well, that sure is a neutral way of presenting it, isn't it?

> Instead, brokers routinely take kickbacks, euphemistically referred to as “rebates,” for routing orders to a particular exchange. As a result, the brokers produce worse outcomes for their institutional investor clients — and therefore, for individual pension beneficiaries, mutual fund investors and insurance policy holders — and ill-gotten gains for the brokers.

"Kickbacks"...that's a strategic word to use. Technically true, but more importantly, emotionally loaded. "Kickback" is not often associated with positive sentiment. "Union leaders receiving kickbacks"..."politicians receiving kickbacks"...

More importantly, this claim is neither axiomatic nor defended by the article. How precisely do these rebates harm investors?

> The diffuse harm to individuals and the concentrated benefit to Wall Street create yet another way in which the system is rigged, justifiably eroding public confidence in the fairness of the financial system.

What the hell? The rhetoric is so heavy-handed - is there no attempt at an unbiased presentation here? I understand this is an opinion piece but come on.

> And yet, brokers choose longer queues hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of times a day. Publicly available trade and quote data show that the queues to buy or sell stock are considerably longer on exchanges that offer kickbacks. Even though the queues decrease the likelihood of getting a trade completed and impair the price performance after the trade is executed, brokers still direct trades to these places because of the kickbacks they receive.

Yes, that's interesting. But how does that correlate with the liquidity available on these exchanges? If you have reduced liquidity, do you want to be in a smaller queue with less price competition? This isn't even addressed.

> One exchange, the IEX, refuses to pay rebates. Created by Brad Katsuyama (whose odyssey to defy the ethos of Wall Street was told in Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys”), IEX has a speed bump that prevents high-frequency traders from front-running ordinary investors. (Yale University, where we work, has a de minimis exposure to IEX through an investment by one of the university’s external managers.)

Okay, so we have blatant hero worship and the claim that high frequency trading is front running in 2017. And this article has reached the front page of Hacker News.

> BATS (a rival stock exchange founded by a high-frequency trader) posts data on this measure of execution quality for the major exchanges on its website. According to our calculations, in the six months before IEX’s arrival, Nasdaq led the effective spread rankings in the widely used Standard & Poor’s 500 index, with the number of top ranks ranging from 169 to 216 stocks.

Okay, where are these calculations? What is the point of making the claim if you don't quantify it whatsoever?!