The HBR article notes two issues:
1. HF traders don't participate in stockholder meetings and thus their trades are divorced from steering company direction.
2. CEOs are focused on next quarter profits and, aside from a few corporate founder CEOs, are not able to have their company innovate.
The first problem is not specific to HFT. Even buy-and-hold mom and pop cannot influence a stockholder meeting because they don't own enough shares to meaningfully do so. The exception proves the rule: a bunch of Palestinian human rights defenders got together, bought some Caterpillar stock, and got a human rights issue on the agenda. Even with all that effort, the measure did not pass. And it was a large effort in coordinating. Individual stockholders usually do not organize, coordinate and campaign. (The "transaction cost" is too high.)
The second problem is caused by SEC, SOX and CEO compensation structure, not by HFT. The HBR article suggests without actually accusing that HFT is the cause.
HFT serves little purpose other than providing market liquidity (and even at that arguably harms it given the flash crash), but it's not to blame for the above two pre-existing problems of today's markets of publicly traded companies.
clicking Like shares anything you watched and what you are watching, not just the original video, essentially making your history available without your consent
Indeed, this shows why we still need the now-amended VPPA.
The blog author is wrong on this one. The original GigaOm article the blog author was commenting on was much more factual.
I found age discrimination 2008-2011 but not now. I expect it will return after the next stock market or dot-com 2.0 crash.
But I'm not in Silicon Valley.
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker