Marketplace Tech®

Marketplace Tech is exploring investment technology as part of the Divided Decade project on the financial crisis of 2008. This is the second half of host Molly Wood’s conversation with Brad Katsuyama, whose IEX stock exchange aims to address some of the negative impacts of high-frequency trading by slowing down the system — by a whole 350 millionths of a second. This speed bump caused what Katsuyama calls “one of the biggest controversies” in the stock market’s recent history as IEX sought approval. (09/19/18)

Marketplace Tech is spending all week looking at the risks technology can introduce to investing. Today, part one of a look at high-frequency trading. Critics of too much high-frequency trading say it makes markets vulnerable to manipulation, and the algorithms that fuel it can cause abrupt dips and rises in stock prices. Brad Katsuyama is a former big bank trader who's the subject of the 2014 Michael Lewis book "Flash Boys." He started studying high-frequency trading before the 2008 financial crash and eventually decided to start his own stock exchange to remove the influence of trading technologies that he says rig the market. Molly Wood talks with Katsuyama and Jonathan Macey, professor of corporate law at Yale, about the implications of high-frequency trading. (09/18/18)

Here at Marketplace, we're doing a yearlong project on the 10-year anniversary of the financial crisis called Divided Decade. At the center of it, of course, were dodgy housing loans that were packaged and resold as seemingly solid investments. They were known as mortgage-backed securities. Here's where the tech comes in: Back in the '90s, a guy named Michael Osinski and his wife, Isabel, wrote software that made it super simple to bundle loans into a security. Osinski retired from Wall Street eight years before the recession to farm oysters on Long Island, where he rode out the financial collapse with few ill effects on his life. Marketplace producer Eliza Mills met Osinski at his oyster beds to hear his story of making a tool that bankers used to bundle bad loans. She shares what she learned with Molly Wood. (09/17/18)

New digital copyright laws pushed forward by the European Parliament this week would make platforms like Google, Facebook and YouTube share more of their profits with creators, news organizations, musicians and artists. The laws would make them be more aggressive about filtering copyrighted material. But critics, including YouTubers, say the law is so broad that it could lead to widespread censorship and even kill off internet memes. Host Molly Wood talks through the issues with Joanna Plucinska, a tech reporter for Politico Europe. (09/14/18)

We are still at least 15 years away from the first human mission to Mars — that’s at the earliest. But that hasn't stopped Hollywood from skipping ahead to the future. Hulu, the online streaming service, is out with a new series Friday called "The First." It's set in the 2030s, and as the name implies, it imagines what that first mission might be like. In addition to getting the astrophysics right, the show producers had to get the future right. And for that they called a futurist. Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, usually helps businesses with strategy. But from time to time, she consults on films or shows set in the future. One of the questions she had to answer on “The First”: Will smartphones still be around in 15 years? She talks about it with Molly Wood. (09/13/18)