July 16, 2009

| Goodbye, Hilzoy >>

Story idea, spurred by an odd and entertaining NYT op-ed.

Yes, everybody knows that these days, most trades on Wall Street are between computer programs. But that’s such a lame generalization. What kind of computer programs? What’s the taxonomy? What do they look like?

The story would basically be a slide-show. Each slide would focus on one flavor of financial app. It would feature, ideally, an actual screen grab—fully annotated—or if that’s not available, a wireframe, based on descriptions and sketches.

It’s likely that many of these apps don’t have user interfaces at all, because they don’t have users. They’re trading daemons—headless market-makers. In that case, I want to know how they think. Imagine a diagram of the basic logic loop that propels a trading-bot through the day. I’m not looking for Goldman Sachs’ secret sauce, here; I want computational finance 101.

The screen-grabs are the key, though. Maybe I’m weird, but honestly, I’m sorta desperate to know what this program looks like:

[…] the finance industry