Your association of a dollar amount to morality is unnerving. If Happy Unicorn Widget Inc. upgrades it's production line speed, it experiences some increase in revenue and can thus even make a $100M a day gasp.
I work at a HFT firm and any serious suggestion of frontrunning would probably get you fired. The truth is the majority of HFT is liquidity providing or some form of arbitrage.
Your association of a dollar amount to morality is unnerving
That's a silly assertion. What if it were $100B a day? That's $35T/year, or half the GDP of the world. Do you think that a company could receive half of the productivity of the entire world morally?
I work at a HFT firm and any serious suggestion of frontrunning would probably get you fired.
Another silly statement. Of course people don't talk about it openly - who plans illicit activities openly? I would expect that anyone involved in such a system would have no knowledge of it being used immorally/illegally - there is too much risk in that.
HFT is an assault rifle. People who make them talk about how they keep the peace, but that isn't the use that caused them to be outlawed.
I work at a HFT firm and any serious suggestion of frontrunning would probably get you fired. The truth is the majority of HFT is liquidity providing or some form of arbitrage.