Why I Care

I like money, or at least having it. I think that this is a sentiment that we can all agree with, even if you don’t like the idea of money you can at least relate to liking having enough of it that you don’t have to worry about it.  I also like passing classes, and not having to do busy work to pass classes. With both of these assertions in mind when I was assigned the task of writing a rather long argumentative essay my first reaction was to find a way that I could associate it with computer science. That weekend I had been reading my news sites and stumbled across some research about black box traders on the forex market and I though “I might be able to do this better”, so I went on a tangent doing some research. The next day class came around and we needed  some topics and it occurred to me that I could not only work on making some money, I could also do research on something I actually cared about and avoid busy work. So I decided to make my topic an essay on how to improve algorithmic traders. 

This topic is import not only because it is addressing an interesting problem (and therefor needs no further justification) but it is also of importance to anyone who is interested in effectively investing effectively in any of the money markets. Having a computer that is able to make wise trades 1000s of time per second would be a huge advantage over the competition that a human trader presents especially if the algorithmic trader was able to adapt to new patterns as quickly as human are able to. Human trader who are not interested in using an algorithmic trader should also be interested so that they can effectively counter the threats posed by such an application.