Video: Inside High-Frequency Trading

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Yesterday we posted on a new Appro high-frequency server targeted at Wall Street. In case you were curious about how such an overclocked machine would be used, check out this video in which Steve Kroft from 60 Minutes gets a rare look inside the secretive world of high-frequency trading. The SEC is scrutinizing this controversial technique in which computers can make thousands of stock trades in less than a second.

Asked if humans are ever involved in the trading, Manoj Narang of Tradeworx said, “Humans are not involved in the trading because humans are way too slow to trade on the kinds of opportunities that we’re trying to capture. We’re trying to capture opportunities that exist for only fractions of a second.”

The video also provides a look inside the New York Stock Exchange’s huge new data center in Mahwah, New Jersey. And if video isn’t your thing, CBS has posted a nice writeup of the story.

A tip of the hat goes to Datacenter Knowledge for pointing us to this article.

Trackbacks

  1. […] we covered here in our recent story on high-frequency trading, the bulk of financial market trades today are computer-initiated. To gain competitive advantage, […]