program trading

• programme trading (UK)

program trading (uncountable)

1. (business, finance, computing) High-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.
   • 1986 Sept. 21, James Sterngold, "Wall Street rethinks its latest trading fad," New York Times (retrieved 31 May 2014):

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

   • 1992 May 17, "Program Traders: They're Back, Without The Bad Vibes," Businessweek (retrieved 31 May 2014):

     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.

   • 2001 June 24, George Russell, "Manic Market," Time (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.

   • 2010 May 8, Sy Harding, "Program Trading Needs To Be Banned," Forbes (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.

• high-frequency trading

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