Computerized stock trading is insidious in several ways. It hurts the small investor, who gets whipsawed by flash crashes and such. It undermines the notion of ownership and property rights. When you "own" a share for a millisecond, the incentives and obligations that go with ownership disappear. And it causes systemic risk and volatility, all under the defense of liquidity, stipulating that if a liquidity factor of 100 is good a liquidity factor of a trillion is better.

So it's good to see that Barron's Jim McTague has written a history of program trading starting with the 1987 stock market crash: Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market into a Casino.

Equity markets are now high-speed casinos rigged against individual investors. Now, Barron’s Washington Editor Jim McTague reveals the twin causes: high-frequency traders and blundering regulators. Learn why the Flash Crash happened (and will again)… discover titanic, uncontrolled forces driving market chaos… find rational strategies for profiting in this terrifying new environment!

The solution isn't to profit from the environment. It's to change the environment.