Bloomberg Business
One of the biggest insights to come out of the May 2010 Flash Crash—when the Dow Jones industrial average suddenly plunged almost 1,000 points, then quickly recovered—wasn’t just how automated the stock market had become, but how little visibility regulators had into it. While high-frequency traders had spent the previous decade building vast computer systems to suck up torrents of market data to feed into their trading algorithms, the Securities and Exchange Commission was stuck in the 20th century, hopelessly outgunned in their ability to track this new breed of computer traders.