Where's your value add, your USP? If you're not going to be the fastest then you can't make money as a market-neutral market maker. You have to be able to offer a better price, by predicting the future value better than other market participants.
For the "faster than a human, slower than HST" niche all I can think of is the traders who automatically react to press releases, twitter and the like. If you're getting data that no-one else has and it affects the price, it doesn't matter whether you're as fast as HST. (Of course if you get competitors who are doing the same thing you still have to be faster than them).
Beyond that most stuff happens at human speed - which doesn't mean you can't do market analysis with algorithms, competing with humans. But speed is always going to be a factor - even if we're talking about e.g. a multi-month analyst investigation that figures out that company X is really a massive fraud (there are trading firms who make their business figuring this stuff out), that still becomes worthless if your competitor finishes their investigation a day earlier than yours.
For the "faster than a human, slower than HST" niche all I can think of is the traders who automatically react to press releases, twitter and the like. If you're getting data that no-one else has and it affects the price, it doesn't matter whether you're as fast as HST. (Of course if you get competitors who are doing the same thing you still have to be faster than them).
Beyond that most stuff happens at human speed - which doesn't mean you can't do market analysis with algorithms, competing with humans. But speed is always going to be a factor - even if we're talking about e.g. a multi-month analyst investigation that figures out that company X is really a massive fraud (there are trading firms who make their business figuring this stuff out), that still becomes worthless if your competitor finishes their investigation a day earlier than yours.