Dark pools

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market follows the takeover of global markets by artificially intelligent trading systems that execute trades in milliseconds, often too fast and too autonomous for the humans who built them to predict.

Scott Patterson opens with programmer Josh Levine, who set out to wrest control of the market from the exchanges that favored big institutions over small investors, then traces how that idealism gave rise to the high-frequency trading arms race and the largely unregulated "dark pools" where much of today's stock trading now happens.