John Netto  HFT trader John Netto says he's seeing the complete
opposite of the fear-driven notion that high frequency traders
are taking over the market.  "Traders are actually taking a step
back from micro- and milli-second trading," he told us in an
interview recently.  The speed game is wholly owned by the banks
and big funds apparently, so now he sees traders trying to
improve their algos more than they are trying to increase the
speed of each trade.  "There are only so many situations to make
money on x number of trades per day," he says. "So now they're
looking to improve their algos."  M3 Capital, Netto's prop
trading unit, is one of them.  "We're not running very many
algos," he says.   He explains:  "I have a penchant for taking
on risk," he says.  Netto says he was born to be a trader
"because it provides a granular scoreboard of how well you're
doing managing your risk."  And for someone who likes taking
risks, relying entirely on algos to trade would probably leave a
lot of the qualitative alpha