I would think that mutual funds and pension funds are at a serious disadvantage if they don’t use these techniques. For us little folk, there’s nowhere to turn, with interest rates on savings being so low.
Pension and mutual funds don’t “trade” stocks, they invest in them. HFT algorithms create “noise” in the trend pattern for stock prices. Long term investors don’t care about the noise, because they invest based on long term trends which aren’t impacted at all by the noise.
In fact, the best long term investors almost never sell anything, they simply rebalance their portfolios by using their dividends to purchase more securities in the underperforming sectors of their portfolio, knowing that sectors are cyclical and the underperformance won’t last forever. Once they have accumulated enough dividend paying stocks, they live off the dividends and eventually off tax free bonds purchased with dividends.
Small investors who think and invest like pension funds can easily become independently wealthy by investing 10 to 20% of their income, depending on their annual salary. Social Security could have made every virtually every retiree in the United States a millionaire if the payroll taxes were responsibly invested, and the US economy would be growing at 4 to 6% per year with the added investment momentum.