Hubertus Bigend would love this.
If we ignore the role of luck, making money by trading stocks and shares requires that you have good information and that you act on it quickly. Stock market trades are exploits, the use of secret information to gain advantage in a system. Human beings cannot act faster than computers, and in particular human beings cannot act faster than clusters of very fast computers located as close as physically possible to the stock exchange and programmed in functional languages using highly tuned algorithms.
But when the “information” that a “market” represents is simply the information in the computer systems that make up its trading systems, markets cease to even pretend to be representations of value and become pure attack vectors.
Deep in the consensual haullucination of the stocks and shares market lurk daemons. The effects of these inhuman agencies produces inhuman artefacts with inhuman aesthetics possessing the naive and threatening charm of Cold War audio synthesizers. Sawtooth waves, square waves, knives. It’s like someone’s plugged a Moog
or a Korg into the stock market and then hacked it for MIDI. This isn’t the music of the spheres, it’s the sound of value being sucked out of society’s marrow by machines. But the machines are just a means to an end. They are not what is truly inhuman here.
http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/CCircleDay.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/20/rogue-high-speed-tra.html