This Is What Wall Street's Terrifying Robot Invasion Looks Like

pigrabbitbear writes "Given the the endless mind-whirling acronyms, derivatives and structures of the financial markets, we're rarely served with a visualization that so elegantly illustrates the arrival of Wall Street's latest innovation. This is what High Frequency Trading — the official monicker of Wall Street's robot army — looks like, when specially programmed computers make massive bets at lightning speed. Created by Nanex, the GIF charts the rise of HFT trading volumes across all U.S. stock exchanges between 2007 and 2012. The initial murmur, the brewing storm, the final detonation: Not just unsettling, it's terrifying."

Comments

Re:Scary, but very cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, they are working on the next gen, its something called Skynet. I hear that will really blow you away!

It hasn't always been this way

[Trogre]

To quote Dave Barry, on the Great Depression as seen from the 1980s:

The stock market of the 1920s was very different from the stock market of today. back then, the market was infested by greed-crazed slimeballs, get-rich-quick speculators with the ethical standards of tapeworms, who shrieked "buy" and "sell" orders into the telephone with no concern whatsoever for the nation's long-term financial well-being. whereas today they use computers.