Steve Kroft gets a rare look inside the secretive world of "high-frequency trading," a controversial technique the SEC is scrutinizing in which computers can make thousands of stock trades in less than a second
The piece gave a detailed account of the fact that most stock trades in the United States are no longer made by actual human traders. Most trades actually are placed by robot computers capable of buying and selling thousands of different securities in the time it took you to read this sentence.
The "60 Minutes" segment showed how supercomputers actually decide which stocks to buy and sell, based on the proprietary, and highly secretive, instructions programmed into them by Wall Street math wizards. The broadcast also showed how high-frequency trading played a distinct role in exacerbating the "flash crash" that took the Dow down some 600 points in about 15 minutes on May 6.
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