High-Frequency Trading and Exchange Technology

October 28th, 2013

Via: ACM:

I remember coming home late one night, and my mother, a math teacher, asked why I was so depressed and exhausted. I said, “Imagine every day you have to figure out a small part of the world. You develop fantastic machines, which can measure everything, and you deploy them to track an object falling. You analyze a million occurrences of this falling event, and along with some of the greatest minds you know, you discover gravity. It’s perfect: you can model it, define it, measure it, and predict it. You test it with your colleagues and say, ‘I will drop this apple from my hand, and it will hit the ground in 3.2 seconds,’ and it does. Then two weeks later, you go to a large conference. You drop the apple in front of the crowd…and it floats up and flies out the window. Gravity is no longer true; it was, but it isn’t now. That’s HFT. As soon as you discover it, you have only a few weeks to capitalize on it; then you have to start all over.”

Research Credit: afterhours

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