About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Opinion: New Wall Street Film Shows That Technology Never Sleeps

Subscribe to our newsletter

By Dr Giles Nelson, Deputy CTO, Progress Software

The latest Wall Street movie – ‘Money Never Sleeps’ – opens with Gordon Gekko, the man who so famously stated “Greed is good” in the first film, being released from jail. It’s a comical scene, contrasting the technology of the ’80s to the tech of today as the guard returns Gekko’s bulky mobile phone.

But it’s not just the then-brick-sized mobile phones that have changed since the 1987 instalment. Gekko is released into a world where the nature of how the financial world is run has completely changed. It’s only after recently revisiting the original movie, however, that I came to realise just how much advances in technology have fundamentally changed the way in which the trading floor environment operates.

Take High frequency trading (HFT), the use of technology to monitor and submit orders to markets extremely quickly, which has been receiving a lot of bad press recently and is sometimes described as “abusive”. It is no more abusive than two traders making trades using only the telephone, as was the case in a scene from the original Wall Street film. Yes, it can be used for rogue trading by the likes of Gekko, but so can any other technology.

Similarly, algorithmic trading is also seen by some as an industry curse. Credit Suisse has been fined this year by an exchange after its algorithmic trading system went out of control and bombarded the exchange with hundreds of thousands of erroneous orders. But this wasn’t a deliberate attempt to manipulate the market. It was a mistake, albeit a careless one. There just weren’t proper controls in place to protect the market from what, ultimately, was human error – the algorithms hadn’t been tested sufficiently.

There is no doubting that technology has generated enormous benefits for trading – greater efficiencies, more market liquidity, tighter spreads and better prices for all. To lose these benefits because of perception would be very dangerous. Having said this, technology has also made the markets faster and more complex. Therefore, all market participants need to up their game by deploying modern monitoring capabilities to spot trading anomalies to help capture the next-generation Gekkos.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The emerging structure of the institutional digital assets market

As interest in trading digital assets continues to increase among institutional investors, so too does the need to focus on market structure, regulation and trading solutions. For financial institutions that get it right the rewards will be significant, but it is not necessarily easy and the challenges are many. This webinar will consider how digital...

BLOG

Forge Launches OMS for Institutional Trading in Private Markets

Forge Global Holdings, the infrastructure, data services, and technology solutions provider, has publicly released Forge Pro, a trade order management system (OMS) specifically designed for institutional investors trading in private company securities. As the interest in private markets grows among institutions, Forge Pro aims to make private market data more accessible while providing investors with...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 13th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

GUIDE

Enterprise Data Management, 2010 Edition

The global regulatory community has become increasingly aware of the data management challenge within financial institutions, as it struggles with its own challenge of better tracking systemic risk across financial markets. The US regulator in particular is seemingly keen to kick off a standardisation process and also wants the regulatory community to begin collecting additional...