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This article contains the first detailed historical study of one of the new high-frequency trading (HFT) firms that have transformed many of the world's financial markets. The study, of Automated Trading Desk (ATD), one of the earliest and most important such firms, focuses on how ATD's algorithms predicted share price changes. The article argues that political-economic struggles are integral to the existence of some of the 'pockets' of predictable structure in the otherwise random movements of prices, to the availability of the data that allow algorithms to identify these pockets, and to the capacity of algorithms to use these predictions to trade profitably. The article also examines the role of HFT algorithms such as ATD's in the epochal, fiercely contested shift in US share trading from 'fixed-role' markets towards 'all-to-all' markets.

This article examines the financing history of the U.S. Social Security system during the period starting with the amendments of 1939 and concluding with the amendments of 1950. It reviews the program's financing policies during this period, and in particular, a series of tax-rate "freezes" enacted during this time. The tax-rate schedule codified in the Social Security Act of 1935 was prevented from taking full effect during these years and the rates were "frozen" at their 1935 level for 15 years. This article seeks to explain the policy context of these rate freezes and their impact on the program's long-range financial solvency. Two major findings emerge from this research: 1. One of the most basic tests of any policy proposal involving Social Security is the projected impact of that proposal on the program's short-range and long-range financing. It would be virtually impossible to propose any serious policy change without a certification from the Social Security actuaries regarding the potential impact of such change. Although Congress enacted the 1939-1949 rate freezes in eight separate legislative acts, the legislative history contains no useable long-range actuarial estimates to gauge the impact of the rate freezes on program financing. How and why such an anomalous circumstance could arise is explored here. cies and has discovered that throughout the period from 1939 to 1950, the Social Security program was almost certainly rendered out of long-range actuarial balance by the rate freezes. How such a circumstance could arise, without serious policy debate, is then examined by situating the rate-freeze decisions in the larger frame of Social Security policymaking during this period.