STARTUPS MOVING INTO HIGH FINANCE
Image via WIRED
High-frequency trading—the act of conducting low yield stock market trades via computer systems so that they can be done at a scale large enough to make real money—is one of the biggertrends on Wall Street right now. In a recent and very much worth your time WIRED feature, Jerry Adler goes inside HFT and the technology behind it, revealing among other things what sharks (yeah, the fish) have to do with these newfangled transactions.
No surprise, then, that startups are beginning to appear in this trading space. Y Combinator company Big Calc makes it simpler for algorithmic traders (“algos”) and analysts to manage huge amounts of data needed to build trade models. On the consumer side, Future Advisor gives personalized advice for individual 401(k) portfolios, including asset suggestions and recommendations on lowering tax exposure. The folks behind Siri are working on a new consumer banking assistant, Lola, which could greatly reduce the annual number of tweets that read “waiting in line at the bank”.
