The Nemesis of High-Speed Traders

Eric Scott Hunsader, the scourge of Wall Street’s high-frequency traders, operates out of an office above the Bliss Salon—manicure/pedicure $45—on Elm Street in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. Hunsader is the founder of Nanex, a 13-year-old firm that operates as a “ticker plant,” taking price streams from U.S. exchanges and distributing the data to clients through software that allows them to analyze and chart it and write their own trading programs.

Spending long hours staring at four computer monitors, he looks for signs of illicit trading hidden in psychedelic images of triangles dancing with dots. Each dot and triangle represents a trade or a quote to buy and sell U.S. stocks by the millisecond. To him the images provide evidence that high-frequency trading firms are exploiting market rules to turn a profit in a lawless environment. “You ever see Lord of the Flies or read that book?” he asks. “When you don’t have a parent around, things fall apart.”