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Trading at the Speed of Light by Donald MacKenzie
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Trading at the Speed of Light

How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets

$26.24

Get for $14.99 with membership
Narrator Jonathan Cowley
Length 11 hours 29 minutes
Language English
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In today's financial markets, trading floors on which brokers buy and sell shares face-to-face have increasingly been replaced by lightning-fast electronic systems that use algorithms to execute astounding volumes of transactions.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, 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 only thirty centimeters, or roughly a foot. That makes HFT exquisitely sensitive to the length and transmission capacity of the cables connecting computer servers to the exchanges' systems and to the location of the microwave towers that carry signals between computer datacenters. Drawing from more than 300 interviews with high-frequency traders, the people who supply them with technological and communication capabilities, exchange staff, regulators, and many others, MacKenzie reveals the extraordinary efforts expended to speed up every aspect of trading.

Donald MacKenzie is professor of sociology at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance and An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets.

Jonathan Cowley is a British voice actor who calls Los Angeles home. He is an accomplished narrator, having recorded over one hundred audiobooks and received AudioFile Earphones Awards for his narration of The Science of Evil by Simon Baron-Cohen, The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart, and The Angry Chef's Guide to Spotting Bullsh*t in the World of Food by Anthony Warner. Jonathan holds a private pilot license and sports the latest in bionic technology, being the proud user of a bionic hand.

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