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The Financial Engineering (FE) Program at the School of Systems and Enterprises is featured this month in a Reuters special report.  The piece describes the emergence of High Frequency Trading within financial markets, and the growing research and professional field of Financial Engineering, which deals with modeling and simulation of market activity and projections in order to create higher return for investors. 

Dr. Khaldoun Khashanah, the founder of the Financial Engineering Program at Stevens,  Yue Li, a graduate student and Joshua Wilder, an alumnus of the Stevens FE program, are profiled in the report, which provides an overview of the growing interest in the field, as well as showcasing programs at Stevens Institute of Technology and New York University. The program at Stevens is still in its first decade, and one of only about 30 programs in the country that instruct students at the graduate and doctoral level on the ins and outs of creating algorithms and ‘black boxes’ that power high frequency trading.  

High frequency trading uses these algorithms to put the power of the latest computing bandwidth to task to scan through dozens of public and private marketplaces at high speed, and complete trades and execute strategies at a staggering rate.  High-frequency traders benefit from competition among the exchanges, which pay small fees that are often collected by the biggest and most active traders.   High frequency trading is another example of how technology can revolutionize the efficiency of markets by linking information flows with investor action and interest more quickly.  Average daily volume of stock exchange transactions has soared in the last few years, and stock exchanges report that high-frequency traders now account for a more than half of all trades.

To learn more about Stevens masters and doctoral program in Financial Engineering, click here.   View the Reuters piece here.