How to lose money - fast!
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 August 2012
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last week Knight Capital lost a lot of money very quickly. It was the latest chapter in the story of something called ‘high frequency trading’. Investors have always valued being the first with the news. But high frequency trading is different: algorithms execute automatic trades, conducted by computers, at astonishing speeds. We ask: is the rapid growth of high frequency trading progress, or – as some think – a threat to the stability of the entire financial system?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:08.9 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.2 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by |
| 0:23.1 | their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me, |
| 0:28.6 | Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello and welcome to more or less. While the rest of the world |
| 0:35.4 | is going faster, higher, stronger, we're double-checking |
| 0:39.2 | the stopwatch. This week, we talk to Mark Henderson, the author who says that the geeks are on the |
| 0:44.7 | march in politics and in life. We'll take yet another brief statistical tour of the Olympic |
| 0:50.2 | medal table, and I'll be reviewing one of the toughest decisions of my life. |
| 0:55.8 | Is that Captain Flack? |
| 0:57.0 | Yes, it is. |
| 0:57.9 | I'm afraid I have some bad news, Captain Flack. |
| 1:00.2 | Can you please find Dibble? |
| 1:01.8 | Find the what? |
| 1:02.9 | Find Dibble. |
| 1:04.0 | Please find him, and tell him he's been made redundant. |
| 1:07.4 | Oh dear. |
| 1:08.5 | Whatever next. |
| 1:10.0 | But first, let me tell you a story about a strange thing that happened last week. |
| 1:14.9 | The New York Stock Exchange launched a new electronic trading platform. |
| 1:18.9 | In preparation for this, a company called Knight Capital had created some software to link up with a new platform in order to trade shares on it. |
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