How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall

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San Francisco design firm Stamen teamed up with Nasdaq to visualize the frenzy of automated trading. This is one minute of bids and offers on March 8, 2011

Steve Swanson was a typical 21-year-old computer nerd with a very atypical job. It was the summer of 1989, and he’d just earned a math degree from the College of Charleston. He tended toward T-shirts and flip-flops and liked Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also spent most of his time in the garage of his college statistics professor, Jim Hawkes, programming algorithms for what would become the world’s first high-frequency trading firm, Automated Trading Desk. Hawkes had hit on an idea to make money on the stock market using predictive formulas designed by his friend David Whitcomb, who taught finance at Rutgers University. It was Swanson’s job to turn Whitcomb’s formulas into computer code. By tapping market data beamed in through a satellite dish bolted to the roof of Hawkes’s garage, the system could predict stock prices 30 to 60 seconds into the future and automatically jump in and out of trades. They named it BORG, which stood for Brokered Order Routing Gateway. It was also a reference to the evil alien race in Star Trek that absorbed entire species into its cybernetic hive mind.

Among the BORG’s first prey were the market makers on the floors of the exchanges who manually posted offers to buy and sell stocks with handwritten tickets. Not only did ATD have a better idea of where prices were headed, it executed trades within one second—a snail’s pace by today’s standards, but far faster than what anyone else was doing then. Whenever a stock’s price changed, ATD’s computers would trade on the offers humans had entered in the exchange’s order book before they could adjust them, and then moments later either buy or sell the shares back to them at the correct price. Bernie Madoff’s firm was then Nasdaq’s (NDAQ) largest market maker. “Madoff hated us,” says Whitcomb. “We ate his lunch in those days.” On average, ATD made less than a penny on every share it traded, but it was trading hundreds of millions of shares a day. Eventually the firm moved out of Hawkes’s garage and into a $36 million modernist campus on the swampy outskirts of Charleston, S.C., some 650 miles from Wall Street.
By 2006 the firm traded between 700 million and 800 million shares a day, accounting for upwards of 9 percent of all stock market volume in the U.S. And it wasn’t alone anymore. A handful of other big electronic trading firms such as Getco, Knight Capital Group, and Citadel were on the scene, having grown out of the trading floors of the mercantile and futures exchanges in Chicago and the stock exchanges in New York. High-frequency trading was becoming more pervasive.

The definition of HFT varies, depending on whom you ask. Essentially, it’s the use of automated strategies to churn through large volumes of orders in fractions of seconds. Some firms can trade in microseconds. (Usually, these shops are trading for themselves rather than clients.) And HFT isn’t just for stocks: Speed traders have made inroads in futures, fixed income, and foreign currencies. Options, not so much.
Back in 2007, traditional trading firms were rushing to automate. That year, Citigroup (C) bought ATD for $680 million. Swanson, then 40, was named head of Citi’s entire electronic stock trading operation and charged with integrating ATD’s systems into the bank globally.
By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. Swanson, tired of Citi’s bureaucracy, left, and in mid-2011 opened his own HFT firm. The private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures gave him tens of millions to open a trading shop, which he called Eladian Partners. If things went well, TCV would kick in another multimillion-dollar round in 2012. But things didn’t go well.


For the first time since its inception, high-frequency trading, the bogey machine of the markets, is in retreat. According to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, as much as two-thirds of all stock trades in the U.S. from 2008 to 2011 were executed by high-frequency firms; today it’s about half. In 2009, high-frequency traders moved about 3.25 billion shares a day. In 2012, it was 1.6 billion a day. Speed traders aren’t just trading fewer shares, they’re making less money on each trade. Average profits have fallen from about a tenth of a penny per share to a twentieth of a penny.