Rise of the algorithms

In Robert Harris’s novel The Fear Index a brilliant physicist creates an artificially intelligent trading algorithm that is fabulously successful and ruthlessly smart. Analysing real-time data from all over the internet, it shorts an airline’s stock before one of its planes crashes, deliberately causes the flash crash in New York and even sends a German cannibal to eat its creator. In other words, it is the ultimate trader.

The algorithm, Vixal-4, doesn’t seem like much of a fiction after visiting Progress Software’s convention last month in Boston aptly named Progress Revolution. For the...