A remarkable look at how the growth, technology, and politics of high-frequency trading have altered global financial markets
In today-s financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions. Trading at the Speed of Light tells the story of this epic transformation. Donald MacKenzie shows how in the 1990s, in what were then the disreputable margins of the US financial system, a new approach to trading-automated high-frequency trading or HFT-began and then spread throughout the world. HFT has brought new efficiency to global trading, but has also created an unrelenting race for speed, leading to a systematic, subterranean battle among HFT algorithms.
In HFT, time is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second), and in a nanosecond the fastest possible signal-light in a vacuum-can travel onl
