FCC club lunch with Brian BROWN
Speaker: Brian BROWN
Author / Founder, The Shogi Group
Topic: The new economy of equity trading
Everyone is affected by the financial markets, whether they are investors or not. Today’s marketplace is more volatile than during the Asian Crisis, in part due to the economic uncertainty but also due to the emergence of a “new economy” of high-frequency trading firms. In today’s marketplace, the most active investors are computers. Mr. BROWN’s talk will be a discussion of the new economy of equity trading and an introspection of how today’s high-frequency marketplace influences our perception of the real economy.
Black-box (or high-frequency) traders have become the new intermediaries in financial markets. Correspondingly, they have a profound impact on the interplay between price, volatility and liquidity, which affects the returns of all investors, yet is often misunderstood by traditional market participants. Black-box trading has displaced traditional participants and raised a number of important questions: Does high-frequency trading create volatility or stabilize the market? How does the speed and pace of the markets affect institutional and retail investors? What do the next few years hold for the evolution of the financial markets?
Brian BROWN is a Wall Street veteran in quantitative trading. He recently completed the book, “Chasing the Same Signals: How Black-Box Trading Influences Stock Markets from Wall Street to Shanghai” Brian spent eight years as an executive at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, serving as director of pan-Asia systematic trading, where he was influential to Asian reforms that increased market efficiency and attracted global investors. He formerly researched and managed statistical arbitrage strategies for Trout Trading Management, one of the legendary Market Wizards and he has advised the industry’s largest hedge funds on how to adapt their models in emerging markets. He is now the founder and Managing Director of the Shogi Group, a start-up venture that designs algorithms to disseminate equity research.
