Inscrutable Wall Street

There is much more to the stock-market than meets the eye: highly complex and sometimes secretive trading methods, known as “dark pools”, manipulate the market in power’s favor. Asset International evaluates several controversial methods including algorithmic trading, dark pools and flash trading: “It’s been a tough year for high-frequency trading. It started last July, when a former Goldman Sachs computer programmer was arrested for allegedly stealing proprietary high-frequency computer code. Few people had any idea what high-frequency trading really involved, but this was the summer of discontent for the recently profitable, but publicly reviled, Goldman ‘Vampire Squid’ Sachs. A few weeks later, The New York Times ran a cover story that credited the trading technique with being able ‘to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders, and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices,’ to the tune of ‘$21 billion in profits,’ during the financial cratering of 2008.”