This is what Shah Gilani says about these trades: Ike

Let me make this perfectly simple…

High-frequency trading is a scam. It should be outlawed.

Period.

Regulators, namely the pimps and panderers at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the exchanges, all of them, are in on the game.

The game, known as HFT, isn’t arbitrage, isn’t fair, isn’t consistent with the keeping of “fair and orderly markets,” and so should be illegal.

In case you don’t know, here are the rules of the game…

1. Pay the exchanges to “co-locate” your servers next to their servers, at the locations where they house them (and rent space to you for that explicit purpose).
2. Get access to quote information (what stocks are being “bid” for at what price and for how many shares, and what is the “ask” price and number of shares that sellers are trying to unload), and be able to place your own bid and ask quotes as fast as technologically possible.
3. Get yourself a bunch of money to trade with. You’ll need millions, so maybe form a partnership to raise money or partner with some banks that don’t already have their own HFT desks, you know, the ones that want to hide what they do.
4. Get yourself a few nuclear physicists, rocket scientists, and computer wizards to write algorithms that can read quotes on both sides of every stock to determine patterns, the depth of markets, and how many shares you can buy or sell and then sell or buy in a matter of less than one-hundredth or one-thousandth of a second.
5. Get your computers to fire off fake bid and ask quotes all the time to see how that changes others’ quotes, in anticipation that they might show how bad they want to buy or sell, and when you get to a place where you can fire trades to buy and sell, almost simultaneously, buy and sell or sell and buy however many shares you can to lock in a profit, no matter how small.
6. Get busier and busier doing this more and more, because you’re only working for a tiny profit on every trade, so do it to trade at least 3.5 billion shares a day, which is half of all the shares that the nation’s 13 exchanges trade daily.
7. Get faster computers and bandwidth and execution speed. If you reach some limit, go the other way. Figure out how to slow down other traders by gumming up the systems everyone uses; you know all the exchanges’ systems that the SEC is supposed to be ensuring provides everyone fair and equal access to. Jam them all up with crazy amounts of fake quotes to increase “latency” (the time it takes to get from A to B for a computer, for other people, like mutual funds and pension peons) so you can head fake them and get your own trades off.
8. Get rich gaming the system!

Look, it’s not even a 12-step program. Just eight simple steps.

You can do it yourself. No one will stop you.

It’s all legal, you know.

For the whole article see below:

http://www.wallstreetinsightsandindictments.com/2012/10/why-high-frequency-trading-is-a-scam/