Should spoofing be legal?

There is a heated debate in the market whether spoofing should be legal. Find below the main arguments of both sides of the debate.

Make it legal arguments:

• Spoofing is simply a form bluffing, and there is no reason for bluffing to be illegal; 
• Spoofing mislead mostly high frequency traders, as they are the first to react to changes in the order book, and HTF are professional traders that should be prepared to take losses if they are not able to adapt their algorithms to other trader's forms of trading; 
• When investors want to trade large blocks of shares, if they do not use means to conceal that there is an additional strong interest entering one side of the order book, such large blocks of trades will have a strong impact in the price, leading the trader to trade at less favorable conditions – one way to achieve such is by placing non-genuine orders in the opposite side of the order book in order to pretend that there is an additional strong interest in both sides of the order book; 
• It can be hard to prove that some specific cancelled orders were intended from start to be cancelled – the large majority of the orders are cancelled… Thus, it is very hard to judge which ones were genuine orders that ended up cancelled and which ones were spoof orders. 

Keep it illegal arguments:

• By spoofing, traders fill up the order book with fake (ie, non-genuine) orders. Thus, significant amounts of such activity create order books that do not reflect the real (ie, genuine) interests to buy and sell securities, and that corresponds to an inefficient market; 
• By spoofing, traders are lying about their trading intents, and that is dishonest.