It is really easy to convince nerds that Wall Street is fundamentally corrupt because of the exploitation of exotic sounding technology, like "high frequency trading".
The reality is that the vast majority of the damage Wall Street inflicted on the US economy had nothing to do with electronic trading. Until someone invents High Frequency Lawyering, the bulk of the work involved in trancheing collateralized debt instruments is going to be paperwork. Those instruments are traded OTC. While there are electronic markets for some of them, like swaps for blue chip companies, those markets have nothing resembling the volume of the NASDAQ. The '07-'08 crash was caused by evil phone calls more than evil computers.
The other thing you'd want to understand is that prior to electronic trading, Wall Street was crooked as a bucket of fish hooks. Before retail electronic trading, if you (you meaning anyone who didn't work for a trading firm) wanted to buy or sell a stock, you had to find an agent to execute the trade for you. As you can imagine, most people have call to engage an agent very few times a year, but agents work with each other all the time. You got worse prices because your orders would quietly be routed through the channels that secured the most grift for your broker.
There are bad things about HFT; for instance, they create an incentive to route very strong CS talent to Wall Street instead of Google. But before you decide that HFT must clearly be evil because it allows the Goldman Sachs of the world to get better deals than mom and pop stock traders (which, note to mom and pop: don't trade stocks), you should probably have a very good idea what a continuous double auction is, and what a market maker does, and have a good idea of who the "big fish" in HFT are actually preying on. It probably isn't your pension fund.
The reality is that the vast majority of the damage Wall Street inflicted on the US economy had nothing to do with electronic trading. Until someone invents High Frequency Lawyering, the bulk of the work involved in trancheing collateralized debt instruments is going to be paperwork. Those instruments are traded OTC. While there are electronic markets for some of them, like swaps for blue chip companies, those markets have nothing resembling the volume of the NASDAQ. The '07-'08 crash was caused by evil phone calls more than evil computers.
The other thing you'd want to understand is that prior to electronic trading, Wall Street was crooked as a bucket of fish hooks. Before retail electronic trading, if you (you meaning anyone who didn't work for a trading firm) wanted to buy or sell a stock, you had to find an agent to execute the trade for you. As you can imagine, most people have call to engage an agent very few times a year, but agents work with each other all the time. You got worse prices because your orders would quietly be routed through the channels that secured the most grift for your broker.
There are bad things about HFT; for instance, they create an incentive to route very strong CS talent to Wall Street instead of Google. But before you decide that HFT must clearly be evil because it allows the Goldman Sachs of the world to get better deals than mom and pop stock traders (which, note to mom and pop: don't trade stocks), you should probably have a very good idea what a continuous double auction is, and what a market maker does, and have a good idea of who the "big fish" in HFT are actually preying on. It probably isn't your pension fund.