The information that the HFT traders pay millions of dollars to acquire before the rest of the market does is not public at the time that they acquire it by any definition of public that does not include having to pay millions of dollars to acquire the information.
That's fundamentally wrong. Direct feeds are available to anyone who wishes to purchase them. Do you have a source for a piece of data purchasable by a firm that isn't on the public side of the information pipe?
> Direct feeds are available to anyone who wishes to purchase them.
Out of curiosity, how much does a direct feed cost, and is there a practical limit to the number of simultaneous buyers (for example, physical server space in a data center)?
