stock market
sciencepunk | September 14, 2011In 2007, the smash-hit game BioShock told the story of Rapture, a city built on the Atlantic seabed dedicated to the pursuit of the free market. Now academic Alexander Wissner-Gross has revealed how the race for light-speed trading could fuel the development of something remarkably similar.
High frequency trading (HFT) exploits tiny differences in the price of a commodity across two markets. As these discrepancies can last a fraction of a second, trading is carried out by computers that make thousands of transactions in milli- or even microseconds. At these speeds, the time it takes to…
razib | December 31, 2009The Massive Stock Market Rally of 2009 Ends Today:
In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a comeback of historic proportions," the U.S. stock market's banner year closes later on today. The paper says, "With one trading day remaining in 2009, the Dow is on track for its biggest annual gain since 2003, when it rose 25%. It finished Wednesday up 3.1 points, at 10548.51, a fresh peak for the year and the highest since October 2008." Leading its business section, New York Times also takes note of this year's rallying stock markets, which "will ring out one of their most volatile periods in…