Does the World Really Need an AI-Powered Dark Pool?

Mathematical formulas, scrawled in red and black, cover a glass wall. The office is small, but the three men who work there, dressed in jeans and sneakers, hovering around an array of computers, have big plans. They want to run a stock market, and they say they and their algorithms can do what even their leanest competitors would need 80 human beings to achieve.

Kelly Littlepage, Stephen Johnson, and Richard Suth have rented a 240-square-foot office in a building on a quiet side street in Lower Manhattan. Next door, a shop sells black leather motorcycle jackets (“Ride or Die”) and retro lamps made from old cassette tapes. The three entrepreneurs say their company, OneChronos, will fundamentally alter the business of buying and selling stocks established more than two centuries ago by the New York Stock Exchange, located just over a mile away.