Here are some quotations from an article in yesterday's Financial Post. This is what we as small individual shareholders and traders are up against in the markets. It certainly paints an image of a giant casino operation where the house, as usual, can't lose.

Over the past decade, these high-tech operators have become a sort of shadow Wall Street — from New Jersey to Kansas City, from Texas to Chicago. Depending on whose estimates you believe, high-frequency traders account for 40% to 70% of all trading on every stock market in the country. Some of the biggest players trade more than a billion shares a day.

These are short-term bets. Very short. The founder of Tradebot, in Kansas City, Mo., told students in 2008 that his firm typically held stocks for 11 seconds. Tradebot, one of the biggest high-frequency traders around, had not had a losing day in four years, he said.


The Tradeworx computers get price quotes from the exchanges, decide how to trade, complete a risk analysis and generate a “buy” or “sell” order — in 20 microseconds.

The computers trade in and out of individual stocks, indexes and exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, all day long. Mr. Narang, for the most part, has no idea which stocks Tradeworx is buying or selling.

Showing a computer chart to a visitor, Mr. Narang zeroes in on one stock that had recently been a winner for the firm. Which stock? Mr. Narang clicks on the chart to bring up the ticker symbol: NETL. What’s that? Mr. Narang clicks a few more times and answers slowly: “NetLogic Microsystems.” He shrugs. “Never heard of it,” he says.