Lexicon packages the news in a way that its robo-clients can understand. It scans every Dow Jones story in real time, looking for textual clues that might indicate how investors should feel about a stock. It then sends that information in machine-readable form to its algorithmic subscribers, which can parse it further, using the resulting data to inform their own investing decisions. Lexicon has helped automate the process of reading the news, drawing insight from it, and using that information to buy or sell a stock. The machines aren’t there just to crunch numbers anymore; they’re now making the decisions.
The stock trade market is going into a path that will certainly doom it in the long run, I think. It’s not a trade market anymore and basically it’s more like a scrape market. The fundamental thing about human society is the interaction between its participants, this meaning also commercial interaction. Until now we used tools to help our decisions in the market, we always did, from calculators to computers. In the end the decision was human. Now we are relying in automated algorithms to do that job for us. This will, in the end, be a subversion of the principle that business is a social contract between two sentient parts. This, while making some (very few) rich, will make the transaction irrelevant in the context of social relations. Everything will be automated. We’ll do what whatever we want with our daily lives that the “System” will react and change accordingly in the “Automated Market System”. This is too dangerous, too irresponsible and in the end will prompt for disaster and new crisis. In the end if you remove the individual from the decision process you don’t need the individual anymore, for anything. That’s the big danger.