program trading

alternative Commonwealth programme trading

1. uncountablebusinessHigh-volume and high-speed buying and selling of investment securities, such as stocks and bonds, which is initiated and executed by brokerage firms' computer programs that continually monitor market conditions.

   But the controversy over program trading, the sophisticated investment strategy responsible for the upheavals that have sometimes marked “witching” Fridays, is far from over.

   1986 September 21, James Sterngold, “Wall Street rethinks its latest trading fad”, in New York Times, retrieved 31 May 2014

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   When program trading came into vogue in the mid-1980s, it was at the forefront of Wall Street's computer revolution—and its practitioners included the Street's largest and most luminous brokerages.

   1992 May 17, “Program Traders: They're Back, Without The Bad Vibes”, in Businessweek, retrieved 31 May 2014

   A more bewildering development is the array of complex, computer-assisted trading techniques that, in taking the stock exchanges by storm, have become a major cause of the market's extraordinary peaks and valleys. The most controversial is known as program trading, in which computers, for example, launch massive buy and sell orders.

   2001 June 24, George Russell, “Manic Market”, in Time, retrieved 31 May 2014

   I’ll say it again: program trading, now known as “high-frequency” trading, serves no purpose but to line the pockets of the program-trading firms at the expense of the millions of other investors participating in the market.

   2010 May 8, Sy Harding, “Program Trading Needs To Be Banned”, in Forbes, retrieved 31 May 2014

   Synonyms: high-frequency trading