A recent Fortune column carried a brow-raising headline--"High frequency trading: Why the robots must die." It will seem vaguely Luddite to many, who have grown accustomed to equating technology with progress on Wall Street. Technology after all was said to have leveled the playing field for individual investors, creating online opportunities for all people to be able to trade like pros. But that's a lot of mere rhetoric in some ways.

The most jaw-dropping advances on Wall Street came in response to a set of regulatory moves that placed a premium on volume on speed. Though recent quarters might suggest otherwise, to make money trading you can't rely on big spreads any more. You've got to get in and out with massive volumes. High-frequency trading was the result of that. And to be sure, there are some who say that such trading benefits traditional traders by adding liquidity in a way that makes for higher quality executions and lower volatility.

In any case, there's a lot of heat right now about the effects of reform and technology. The Fortune article notes a recently updated study by Grant Thornton that suggests the market reforms over the years--decimalization, Reg NMS and like--have made small-cap trading much harder, which has in turn gutted the IPO market. The recent gyrations on Wall Street may lead more people to raise these issues.

Technology of course isn't the issue. It's how you use the technology. Grant Thornton has proposed a whole new market optimized for small-cap IPOs. A lot of issues may get a hearing in the wake of last week's events.

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