what have you been doing for the last 8 years since you stop trading from 2011? do you have a full time job?
ah i get it now....don't think you were trading back from 1999 - 2009. more like gambling than trading since you consider yourself a piker.
Ok my participation in this thread is over. I'll start some new threads about specific questions I have on other threads. TBH I'm not sure what I have to say is worth anything to an aspiring trader. Just brain storming. I know this. Right now I'm trying to develop a temporary edge. By nature all such edges are temporary. Some last only a few days. Even a single day for a day trader. Hold them dear. The more people who know, the quicker that edge will dissipate.
In the raging bull market from 2009 to 2017, all monkeys (me) had to do was betting with the market, especially if we traded options. Imagine if you kept going. As @murray t turtle love to say, not a prediction.
The answer is no. Time & Sales is not reliable information for analysis for profitable trading anyway, hft or not. And honestly HFT manipulation should be the least of your worries. All they did was making scalping unprofitable but nothing else. If you have a profitable strategy, it should still work, even intra-day trading as long as you stay away from scalping. So if you were concerned about the string of losses, it is something else or it might be just your profit/loss ratio of your strategy in that you just hit a string of losses that make up the loss ratio. So my advice to you: Stop researching about ways to combat HFT instead focus on examining your strategy itself more closely and try to increase its profitability.