TECH TUESDAY is a weekly content series covering all aspects of capital markets technology. TECH TUESDAY is produced in collaboration with Nasdaq.
With the holidays rapidly approaching, it’s an opportune time to review the year to date and look ahead to what might be in store for 2025.
Tech Tuesday covered many topics in 2024, ranging from regulatory proposals on U.S. equity market structure to trends in options markets, exchange technology in Latin America and the development of carbon markets.
But assessing the most-viewed Tech Tuesday articles of the year reveals two technology topics that resonated most: trading speed and artificial intelligence (AI).
Nasdaq Chief Economist Phil Mackintosh, a frequent Tech Tuesday guest author, published two related articles about trading speed among the dozen most-hit Tech Tuesdays in 2024: Trading as Fast as Lightning, published on May 7, and How Trades Speed Between Venues, published on June 11.
The first article noted that fiber optics, microwave and lasers replaced trading pits as trade-transmission methods over the past 50 years and cited the advantages and disadvantages of each. The upshot is that even seemingly minute differences in trading speed matter to some market participants.
“Even in an Olympic race, a split second can be the difference between winning and second place – here, it might mean completing an arbitrage or being legged and exposed to losses,” Mackintosh wrote. “It’s likely that the race for lower latency will continue.”
The June article followed up on that with an analysis of actual action and reaction times between different markets. “We see evidence that optic fiber and radio wave dominate in different scenarios,” the article stated. “We also see that the price-setting exchange has the lowest latency and, therefore, the lower opportunity for microwave to provide advantages to traders.”
While trading speed and the ‘race to zero’ is a topic that has been important to market participants and infrastructure providers for more than a decade, generative AI is a much newer topic of interest. But with the spotlight on gen AI as perhaps the most impactful emerging technology across industries, it’s no surprise that it was alongside trading speed as a popular topic among Tech Tuesday readers in 2024.
How AI is Changing Trading, published on August 13, covered how Nasdaq is leveraging AI to modernize markets and offered an academic perspective on AI and big data applications for investment and asset management.
Assessing the ‘Incredible Capability’ of Gen AI, published on July 16, presented takeaways from the AWS Summit New York, including a bold statement that Gen AI represents “probably the single largest shift in how we interact with data, information and each other since the advent of the very earliest Internet.”
Lastly, Assessing the Present and Future of AI in Markets, published on May 21, featured a Q&A with Nasdaq Head of AI and Emerging Technology, Mike O’Rourke, to learn more about the current AI landscape and its expected evolution.
AI will likely be a hot topic for the foreseeable future. In capital markets, it is gaining traction in areas including market surveillance and abuse prevention, market analysis, investment strategy development and trade execution. More broadly, asset management giant BlackRock noted in a 2025 thematic outlook that “massive investment in AI infrastructure as well as ever more powerful chips and models, are laying the groundwork for increased adoption” across industries.
Traders Magazine and Nasdaq would like to thank Tech Tuesday readers for their interest and support throughout the year. We wish you a great holiday season and a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025!
Tech Tuesday will resume on Tuesday, January 7, 2025.
