"but the more stringent rules to come will have the greatest impact as they intend to include requirements for orders to rest on the exchange book for at least half-a-second, and potentially order-to-trade ratio caps."

This is a quote from GWR's post about Germany and the EU considering action to curb the excesses of HFT. It just brought home to me how radically technology has changed the investment universe. In my view, not necessarily for the better. Here we sit as old ECU investors who did our DD and saw enough positives in the story to invest "for the long haul." Years later our ECU shares are still worth only around 25 cents while the HFT boys make money by manipulating the AUM share price up and down by half cent increments. And the regulators are going to take the radical step of requiring them to leave their orders open for "at least half-a-second." The mind boggles.