“The kind of trading strategies our system uses are not the kind of strategies that humans use,” Kharitonov continues. “We’re not competing with humans, because when you’re trading thousands of stocks simultaneously, trying to capture very, very small changes, the human brain is just not good at that. We’re playing on a different field, trying to exploit effects that are too complex for the human brain. They require you to look at hundreds of thousands of things simultaneously and to be trading a little bit of each stock. Humans just can’t do that.”

By Felix Salmon and Jon Stokes, Wired