Automating the trading desk
Self-driving cars are becoming ubiquitous in cities like San Francisco, but are still a rare sight in most places. Experts like to talk of five or six stages of automation, starting with completely manual driving to fully automated. The big dividing line is between where machines are driving assistants, under human supervision, to where machines monitor the driving environment, and ask humans to help where needed.
A similar debate is taking place in trading. Small trades are like boring motorway driving, where the human leaves things to the automated assistant. High touch or complex orders are like icy country roads or busy city streets, where humans mostly take over. As this week’s feature article explores, buyside firms are still on the human side of the dividing line but increasingly are talking about their plans to cross over to the automated side.
