Ever heard of HFT? No? Well, it stands for 'High Frequency Trading' also known as 'Robot-trading'. Put simply HFT is super-fast computer trading used in the financial markets. It seems though that HFT has been problematic in the past; even according to people within the financial sector, HFT is "socially useless" or encourages "predatory trading" practices. Meanwhile, the European Parliament has legislated to put limits on HFT because it can go wrong or can facilitate the kind of financial skullduggery that wrecked the world economy. Not surprisingly the Tories (more than half of their funding comes from the finanial sector) did their best to water down the HFT by using a bent panel to assess the legislation. At the same time, the Tories are also opposing a Europen Financial Transaction Tax, or Robin Hood Tax. So it looks like, as anyone with half a brain knows, this appalling Government is never going to allow real reform of the financial sector when it is funded by the spivs who fucked everything up in the first place.
'Fifteen years ago the computer program Deep Blue made headlines around the world by beating chess giant Garry Kasparov. In the years since, computer algorithms have quietly gone on to dominate large parts of the financial markets.
'Computer-driven trading now accounts for 70 per cent of trading in the US equity market, 36 per cent in the UK. Machines fire tens of thousands of trades a second, relying on state-of-the art technology and proximity to stock exchanges to shave microseconds off transaction times.
'Yet tiny errors in the algorithms can have devastating consequences. During the infamous "Flash Crash" of 2010 the Dow Jones index dropped nine per cent in a matter of minutes. Over the summer Knight Capital - a leading New York HFT (high frequency trading) firm - erroneously swamped the stock market with errant trades, wiping $440m from the firm's value.' (New Statesman article).
media-underground.net