It may be time to start worrying about a tech bubble again.

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From Saul Goodman of "Breaking Bad" to Harold Melvoin of "The Sopranos," sleazy lawyers on the teevee are always giving criminals career advice. This happens in real life, too.

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Hey, don't feel bad, vassals, CEOs are just like you -- they, too, only got tiny raises last year.

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When it comes to monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has just two jobs, and it's failing at both of them.

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Attorney General Eric Holder wants to clear up something he said months ago: We only thought he said that some U.S. banks are too big to jail. What he meant was the exact opposite of that, he would like us to know.

Holder was testifying at a super-fun House...

Apparently hunting for the "God particle" is not nearly as exciting or lucrative as doing "God's work" for Goldman Sachs.

Goldman has recently hired a physicist named Ryan Buckingham away from the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (a/k/a CERN) in Switzerland, reports Sarah...

Four years after the Great Recession, U.S. households are slowly repairing their balance sheets and shedding their debt -- except when it comes to student loans.

A new survey of consumer debt by the New York Federal Reserve finds that households shed $110 billion in debt in the...

The job market is obviously broken, but a new study suggests the damage might not all be permanent.

Economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve on Monday suggested that the recent mysterious trend of workers dropping out of the labor force is at least partly due to plain...

冒頭の動画で示されているのは、5月2日にジョンソン・エンド・ジョンソン社の株式に関して「2分の1秒間」に行われた取引の様子だ。人間の目にも何が起きているのか理解できるようにするため、1000分の1秒である「ミリ秒」単位の時間となっている。

動画は5月7日にWIREDカンファレンスでNanex社の創立者、エリック・ハンセイダー氏が発表したものだ。同氏によると、動画になっている2分の1秒間には、1200件の注文と、215件の実際の取引が発生しているという（動画内に表示される色の付いたボックスは取引所、移動する点は個別注文を表している）。このような取引が1日に10万回発生している、と同氏は推測する。

[高頻度トレーディング（High-Frequency Trading）と呼ばれ、非常に高い取引頻度によって高い資本回転率を実現することで収益を上げる投資手法。現在では米国株市場の7割、欧州の4割の売買にこの手法が用いられているとされる]

Nanex社は昨年、株式市場における高頻度取引ロボットの増加を示すGIFも制作した[以下の動画、2007年から2012年までの変化を示したもの]。今回発表された動画では、今や市場全体の半分以上を管理するまでになったこの種のロボットが、毎日24時間何を行っているのかがはっきりと示されている。

高頻度取引の擁護者は、この取引が市場に「流動性」をもたらすものであると主張している。注文の流れをスムーズにすることで取引コストが削減でき、誰もが利益を得られるという考え方だ。ただし、この意見の裏付けとなる調査は、高頻度取引を行う企業から資金提供を受けているため、公平性には疑問が残る。

また、いったん異常が生じた時には、流動性が一気に消え失せる。2013年4月に発生したTwitterアカウントのハッキング[AP通信のTwitterアカウントがハッキングされ、ホワイトハウスが爆破されたという誤報が流された]によって生じた瞬間暴落（フラッシュ・クラッシュ）や、3年前に起きた大規模な瞬間暴落[2010年5月にダウ工業株30種平均が数分のうちに1000ドル下落、次の数分で大半を回復する史上最大の乱高下となった]などの大規模な障害に生じることもある。

欧州連合では2012年、市場を脅かし混乱させるクオート・スタッフィング[大量の株の売買注文を超高速で出して、すぐさまキャンセルすること。株価を変動させてその差額を利用する裁定取引を行い利益を上げることが目的]を最小限に抑える目的で、最低でも2分の1秒間は取引を存続させることを義務付ける新しい規制法が承認された。2分の1秒が、「長い時間」と認められた出来事でもある。

米国証券取引委員会（SEC）は2012年、高頻度取引企業のTradeworx社を採用して、高速取引の監視を行なっている。この監視プロジェクトは、触ったものすべてを黄金に変えるギリシャ神話の王の名前を取り、「ミダス」と名付けられた。

[US版で2013年5月9日に掲載した記事を翻訳しました]
[Mark Gongloff 日本語版：兵藤説子／ガリレオ]

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