Whoa, this is wild. It's a video showing a mere 10 seconds worth of trade activity for BlackBerry on October 2 — and the whole thing runs for over three-and-a-half very busy minutes.
The stock market certainly ain't what it used to be. These days, computers execute trades at blisteringly fast intervals, resulting in incomprehensible computer behaviors that are leaving humans behind.
Earlier this week, amid news of more-than-expected Blackberry losses and the potential for a buy-out (namely by FairFax Financial), the troubled smartphone maker's stock value warbled and dropped down to $7.92 — more than a full dollar below what was anticipated. This generated a flurry of activity — and as is typical these days, it all went down so very, very fast; computers trade on the order of milliseconds.
But this video, produced by Eric Hunsader of Nanex, offers us puny humans a tiny glimpse of what's going on in high-frequency trading computer land. Well, at least for 10 second's worth, anyway. The result is sobering, to say the least.
Hunsader wrote the graphics in-house using simple Windows GDI calls and drawing data from his company's NxCore product.