Turquoise. BATS Global Markets and Chi-X Europe Enter Exclusive Negotiations. Algorithms Take Control of Wall Street. Today Wall Street is ruled by thousands of little algorithms, and they've created a new market—volatile, unpredictable, and impossible for humans to comprehend.Photo: Mauricio Alejo Last spring, Dow Jones launched a new service called Lexicon, which sends real-time financial news to professional investors.
This in itself is not surprising. The company behind The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires made its name by publishing the kind of news that moves the stock market. But many of the professional investors subscribing to Lexicon aren’t human—they’re algorithms, the lines of code that govern an increasing amount of global trading activity—and they don’t read news the way humans do. They don’t need their information delivered in the form of a story or even in sentences.