Over the last ten years, the financial industry has undergone a
revolution. Since the dawn of commerce, every market across the globe
has been based on the same model. Registered "experts" would come
together and trade commodities or financial instruments in person,
usually in an open-outcry system. 

Two advances brought great change to this model. The first was the
widespread use of computers to do historical statistical analysis and
real-time computation. Even with these tools, it was not until the
development of reliable, inexpensive and extremely fast networks that
they could be used to their full potential.

  It is now the case that almost 100% of orders submitted to exchanges
are done electronically, either by humans using software or automated
trading systems.

  In this talk, I will give an overview of the most common trading
systems, from international real-time exchange data dispersion to
order-management software. I will also give some specific examples of
the strategies being developed today to absorb and make use of the vast
amounts of data.