High-frequency traders pay big money — thousands of dollars a month — for direct access to news releases that contain market-moving information.

They're paying Business Wire, which provides corporate-earnings releases and economic news such as the Philadelphia Federal Reserve's monthly manufacturing survey, and Marketwired, which offers earnings releases and the ADP monthly jobs report, according to The Wall Street Journal.

What the trading firms are doing is perfectly legal. "Anyone can get a direct data feed if they want," Tom Becktold, a spokesman for Business Wire, tells The Journal.

Editor’s Note: 38 Trades That Could Turn $1,000 Into $49,000

The high-frequency traders seek to analyze the data and trade on it before other market participants react. Most investors receive news releases from media companies such as Bloomberg and Dow Jones or websites like Yahoo Finance, The Journal reports.

Not every provider of financial information offers direct access to traders. PR Newswire tells the paper it won't give its "Disclosure Feed" directly to any trading firm, despite repeated requests.

Spano Trading of Miami Beach subscribes to Business Wire. "The faster you want the data, the more it costs," founder Joseph Spano tells The Journal. "I guess this is capitalism."

Some experts question the value of high-frequency trading.

"Many observers and analysts here in the U.S. and overseas have found that high-frequency trading actually raises costs and risks for small investors as a result of an increase in variability and uncertainty," Gerald Epstein, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, tells Bankrate.com.

"And it might reduce returns that these investors get because of phenomena like 'front running.'"

Editor’s Note: 38 Trades That Could Turn $1,000 Into $49,000

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