"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

This is one of Henry Ford's most famous quotes. Over a hundred years ago, people got from place to place on a four-legged beast and weren't exactly imaginative about innovations in transportation technology. Nowadays, people in the high frequency trading space are in the same place. If you ask high frequency traders what they want, a lot of them would say simply, "Faster Algorithms."

All things being equal, everybody wants their systems to run faster. This isn't just in high frequency trading - this goes for engineering, medicine, hell - even my grandma would like to get to her Solitaire game a bit more quickly. There's always this question of speed in high frequency trading - but I'm not convinced that you have to have the fastest system or lowest latency connectivity out there. "Fast enough" is good enough. The question that a high frequency trader should be asking isn't, "How fast can I make this?" but instead, "How fast does my strategy need to be to achieve acceptable profits?"

As far as I can tell, you can be successful by being smart OR by being fast. You don't neeed to max out on both. An innovative trader can create a winning system without any automation at all - so even with technology that's not racing the speed of light, traders should be able to automate smart, profitable strategies.

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