To hear some tell it, it was as if Wall Street were facing its very own “rise of the machines,” a strange and chaotic robot uprising that wreaked havoc amongst a wide assortment of stocks yesterday morning. “The robots are attacking Wall Street’s integrity,” the New York Post declared. “It’s like technology out of control,” one floor trader at the New York Stock Exchange told Bloomberg. “The machines have taken over,” a market consultant told the New York Times. One trader wondered if poor humans would be left to fend for themselves in “a terminator infested market ran by algos and [High Frequency Traders,] slaughtering the last of the human day traders that are left.”
But was it really as dire as all that?
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