I was more specific than "liquidity". I said "reduced spreads and lowered trading costs". It is better for you to pay less to execute a trade than to pay more for it.
I don't know what an HFT MM has to do with people manipulating the stock markets directionally.
Sorry - I was referring more to some other stuff I was reading than anything you said.
It has to do with it because it enables it. It's part of abstracting investing away from providing capital to companies because you believe they will succeed. Somewhere there is an argument for why these abstractions are beneficial to more than just the people profiting off of them. Why do you keep studiously avoiding engaging on this?
I'm interested in discussing things that are knowable, and where I have some chance of learning things. You said that HFT was absurd. It was easy to point out that there are real, practical benefits to HFT (those benefits become even clearer if you do some reading on how crooked the human-scale market making system was prior to HFT; Google, for instance, [odd eighths]).
That's the extent of my interest in this discussion. If you do some research and find out something that refutes my argument about HFT, I'd be interested in learning about it. Otherwise, I think if we're on the same page about this detail of the thread, it's fine to leave it there.
I don't know what an HFT MM has to do with people manipulating the stock markets directionally.