trading

In 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…