[hsk]

You're overestimating the effectiveness of computers in taking in data and finding patterns. If you throw data naively at an algorithm, you'll get garbage. It's especially difficult to make sense out of trading data because of the sheer size and percentage of noise.

For any given trading strategy, a ton of thought, testing, and domain knowledge goes into creating the algorithm. It is not a black box that writes itself.

That said, computers are far more effective at certain tasks, especially latency sensitive simple calculations, just as calculators are far better at doing arithmetic.

[ar7hur]

I agree. And the OP is also underestimating the effectiveness of insider trading.