In late 2021, China’s securities regulator stepped in to restrict quant trading. The ostensible reason was to prevent market manipulation and protect ordinary investors. This rationale has a great deal of truth to it. For years, high-frequency trading firms ran strategies that most small traders couldn’t see, much less compete with. They front-run orders by milliseconds by exploiting delays in the system to extract tiny fractions from millions of trades. Their activity absorbs electricity, computing resources, and human ingenuity without creating any social value in the process. It simply redistributes existing wealth from slower traders to faster ones in a steady wealth transfer to a handful of math PhDs with server farms.