I'm always impressed how direct the relationship between profit and mathematics/physics/electronics is in HFT. It feels like a marker of civilizational advancement – it's not enough abstraction to just have fungible means of payment and slices of enterprises, not enough to have instruments derived from these, not even enough to have the ability to trade from afar using electricity. At this point there's value even in making the trades as close to instant as possible. Is it _good_? That's what I don't know – in some way it seems more divorced from reality than the engineering of F1, in another it seems more grounded