Dark Pools High-speed traders, A.I. bandits, and the threat to th

Scott Patterson chronicles the next-generation financial threat: the growing embrace of artificial intelligence and the chilling prospect that soon so much trading will be ceded to computers that humans will cease to know exactly what is going on -- or what could happen. In Dark Pools, former Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson lifts the lid on the insane quest for ever-more-intelligent trading programmes, ones that learn from each trade they process to become, in effect 'robot versions of Warren Buffett'. As their tentacles spread all over the planet and the 'market conversation' becomes, increasingly, one super-intelligent machine talking to another in private exchanges known as 'dark pools', questions about future stability of the system need to be answered. In a system with no transparency, how can we regulate these 'dark pools'? If computers are trading with each other, have people lost control? If it all comes crashing down, whose fault will it be? Pacy, revealing and profoundly chilling, Dark Pools gets behind the scenes of the financial markets to show just how shady some deals have become.