Can You Really Game Index Funds?

Here is a Bloomberg News article about how banks and hedge funds are front-running index funds by buying stocks before they are added to indexes, and maybe the first thing to say is, man, remember when "front-running" meant something? Here is Wikipedia: "Front running is the illegal practice of a stockbroker executing orders on a security for its own account while taking advantage of advance knowledge of pending orders from its customers." But then came "Flash Boys," which used the term to describe high-frequency traders "seeing an investor trying to do something in one place and racing ahead of him to the next," eliminating the broker/customer relationship (and the illegality) from the definition. Other HFT-related expansions of the term followed: If news comes out, and a high-frequency trader acts on the news in milliseconds while a retail investor takes minutes, then isn't the HFT front-running the retail guy? (No.) And now, basically any time anyone trades on public information before someone else, it's "front-running," albeit legal front-running:

Four days! You didn't need to be a sophisticated low-latency computer algorithm to trade ahead of American's addition to the S&P 500 index. A regular human retail trader could have read the S&P news release on Monday afternoon, had dinner with friends, seen a movie, gotten a good night's sleep, spent Tuesday morning doing research to confirm that American was in fact going to join the S&P 500 and that a lot of index fund money tracks the S&P 500, gone out for a two-martini lunch, had 40 martinis, gotten blackout drunk, woken up in the hospital, spent 48 hours recovering and still had time to buy the stock before it joined the S&P on Friday afternoon. If it takes you more than four days to push a button, don't go around complaining that other people are too nimble and fleet-footed.