“The high speed trading algorithms have gotten so ridiculous that microseconds matter. “
If the exchange moves then other businesses (brokers) will follow then.
My point is that the trading on Apple (or any other company) stock isn't about how much money Apple will make in the next ten years, but rather if I can get a hundredth of a cent more on a buy-sell sequence than the broker across the hall. That's no longer investing, it's gambling on trading computer reaction speed. It would make as much sense as having the floor traders bet on Rock-Paper-Scissors while spending millions on analyzing each others tells and muscle twitches to see if you can predict whether they are going for rock or paper. Very soon you forget that you were once trying to predict Apple's profitability.
And a lot of it is just to front-run the real investors, so if they find out I want to buy Apple they can buy it a fraction of a second before me and run up the price by a penny per share. Do that a million times a day and you're talking about real money.