I don’t see how it’s a benefit to capitalism or companies or, well, anyone, really, to allow people to make thousands of trades a day for minute profits on each.
My gut feeling is that the stock market would not suffer, and less resources would be wasted, if trades and updates to stock prices were limited to, say, one batch per hour.
There are probably reasons the system is the way it is though.
Maybe we could charge a minor fee per transaction, too small to matter for most stock traders. High frequency traders though would have to pay quite a lot simply by making lots of transactions.
They pondered some ridiculously low fee, like 0.0000002% (no kidding) and it was too much here in the EU.
If you’re HFT/scalping you’ll almost always be trading DMA in which case you’ll almost always have per-share commission, usually less than .005
The investment bank already does that and calls it commission. It’s basically how the Wolf of Wall Street’s main character got started: commission on penny stocks.