If you are comparing bitcoin markets to HFT, like on wall street, then you are wasting your time. You will not gain anything by having a better ping time to a bitcoin exchange. The servers are simply not fast enough, not reliable enough, etc to make a difference. They don't run on platforms where response times are important.
Not only that the markets are not as "perfect".
A perfect (mostly theoretical) market is one where products are perfectly priced. Nothing is ever sold overvalue or undervalue. There are no arbitrage possibilities.
If US stock markets in the 1970s were a 7 on the "perfect" scale then today they are maybe a 8 or 9. This is why you see HFT, low latency links, companies paying MASSIVE bandwidth fees to get a 5ms shorter hop to london (google Hibernia Atlantic), etc.
As the market gets closer and closer to perfect it requires greater and greater "schemes" to gain a slight advantage on competitors.
Bitcoin is nowhere near that. Hell I am not a speculator and when advised of an arbitrage opportunity (via the forums a couple hours after it happened) I manually moved funds between Mt Gox and Tradehill took a quick 2% profit and the opportunity lasted for hours longer.