Algo Trading: FinTechIsrael’s Flavor of the Month

Line Break

Author: Eli Magid (17 Articles)

Eli currently works in business development and strategic planning for Israel Corp. Prior to joining Israel Corp., Eli held capital markets and corporate finance positions at Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley. In addition, he is a former financial markets entrepreneur and co-founder of a green carbon finance start-up. Eli has a BSc in Applied Economics & Management from Cornell University.

Thanks for returning to FinTechIsrael! Have you already subscribed to our RSS feed?

Five years ago, less than 25% of U.S. stock-trading volume was generated by high-frequency or algorithmic trading, with few considering it more than a niche strategy.. That percentage has since more than doubled even as overall volumes increased, with some estimating as much as two-thirds of daily volume now stems from these funds.

This past June, Rob Curran and Geoffrey Rogow remarked upon this phenomenon in an article aptly titled Rise of the (Market) Machines that “The U.S. stock market has switched to automatic from manual transmission, forcing investors to relearn how to drive.”

And while we as Israelis are not widely renown for our driving skills, we’re starting to get behind the wheel of this growing segment of the capital markets with the intensity of a NASCAR driver. For starters, check out Calcalist’s Shay Aspril’s breakdown of Israeli algo activity and further comments from VC Café on the success of Final.

In this spirit, we’ve decided to hone in on algo trading and the underlying technologies that support it, making it the FinTechIsrael flavor of the month. As a lead up to our next event, we’re working on a series of short articles introducing this captivating intersection between finance and technology to the FinTechIsrael community.

We hope you tune in for more in the coming days…