Donald MacKenzie, a sociologist of science and technology, is a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets was published by Princeton in 2021.
Sometimes, the most important – and perturbing – insights make their way into the world without fanfare. As yet, few have picked up on an analysis by the New York University economist Thomas Philippon of the history of the unit cost of financial intermediation. The unit cost is a measure of the efficiency of the financial system, and Philippon tracks its level in the United...
‘Dark pools’ are private, electronic share-trading venues in which a participant can bid to buy shares or offer to sell them without those bids or offers being visible to the market at large. For most of their history – they’ve been around for nearly thirty years – they have attracted little attention, but that has changed fast in the last couple of years....
On 21 April, the financial trader Navinder Singh Sarao was arrested in West London. The US authorities are seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois after charges were issued against him by the US Department of Justice. The DoJ alleges he was in the habit of ‘spoofing’ futures markets, by entering orders without genuinely intending to buy or sell, and that this...
A data centre is a room or an entire building housing computers, network connection equipment and telecommunications links. Many data centres are built for the exclusive use of just one company, such as Google, but others host – and interconnect – systems belonging to many different users. One of the world’s largest multi-user data centres was once a high-volume...
The beams are infrared, which means you can’t see them, but lasers are now flashing stock-market data through the skies over New Jersey. If they work well there, they might soon be flashing over London too. Lasers are the latest tool for high-frequency trading: the fast, entirely automated trading of large numbers of shares and other financial instruments. Originally, the data needed for high-frequency trading travelled almost exclusively via fibre-optic cables, in which signals move at about two-thirds of the speed that light travels in a vacuum.
We are all prisoners of our backgrounds as well as slaves to our genes, and no field of science is riper for sociological investigation based on this premise than the development of biometry, and...
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