Zippy agents going for brokers

For as long as there have been exchanges for shares, currencies or commodities, investors have looked for ways to beat the markets and produce above-average returns. Highly-skilled traders and fund managers command premium salaries for their abilities to second-guess market moves and return profits to their clients. But developments in computer science mean that automated trading systems could well outperform even experienced traders across global financial markets. Researchers at HP's European labs in Bristol, England have found that international financial institutions are increasingly showing interest in their work on automated trading agents - despite the fact that the agents were not originally developed for financial markets. HP Labs' complex adaptive systems group first started working on trading algorithms in the mid-1990s.