Jamie the Prospector

I wrote this fictional short story in 1995, when it was first published in the Mondo Visione World Handbook of Stock Exchanges. It was intended as a light take on the shape of things to come in the world of Stock Exchanges. The story is about a trader who makes a fortune from computerised trading at the turn of the millennium. This is no longer fiction. Now fortunes are won and lost daily by computer algorithms designed to beat the market. Stock Exchanges themselves use computer algorithms to match trading instructions electronically, and compete to offer ever faster systems. The traditional trading floors where traders congregated to do business have been replaced largely by myriads of computers in the cloud. The availability of increasing computer power at ever decreasing costs has allowed new entrants to enter the market and compete with incumbent Exchanges to provide automated trading services. The whole system is interconnected globally via high speed fibre networks. Some think that the process of automation has gone too far, and the ever faster trading processes cause market instability. Certainly computer glitches, erroneous trading instructions  and other effects have at times caused extreme gyrations in market prices. If you are interested in that theme you may also want to checkout a more recent title in the Apple iBooks Store called “Jamie’s Big Idea.”