Share your insights or perspective on the financial matter presented in the input.

Can institutional, quant, or other professional traders “prey on” (make money from) retail investors?
The primary advantage of HFTs is their speed to act upon opportunities that exist for only fractions of a second. The reason why they are able to do this is because they invest heavily in hardware, custom software, and custom algorithms.  Most of the fleeting advantage, as they all manage to top each other's hardware seemingly every other day, is from the hardware investment.  To see the extremes that HFTs will go to invest in hardware, one might view this. It is highly likely that the trader with the market making algorithm could have been ignorant of the "hide not slide" order and missed out on many more opportunities while still being successful.  Haim Bodek, who is very much against this order type, was not so lucky. If it was truly an investment bank then it was unlikely that they were actually front running, which is very illegal and easily possible with much more low tech means, since companies like Citadel handle most orders now, and they have not been successful in investment banking. The reality of HFT is slowly coming to light, that while HFT can provide extremely consistent returns with enormous sharpe ratios, the capital investment is equally enormous, and the amount of capital that can be employed is also as enormously limited.  After all, the richest people on the planet are not HFT owners. Also, when it comes to time periods longer than 500ms, their results become very human.