Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
How the US stock market is a cryptography problem that almost no one
Allison Bishop
Proof Trading
Abstract:
On any given day, billions of shares are traded on the US stock market. Nonetheless, institutions who seek to buy or sell large amounts of stock may stick out in the crowd and fall victim to predatory behavior. They refer to this problem as "information leakage," which sounds technical, but there is no widely accepted definition of the phenomenon, and little in the way of public-facing research on the topic. In this talk, I'll describe why cryptographers and computer scientists are well-suited to approach this problem, and why more public research would be good for the health of the financial industry. I will also discuss the related historical and economic trends that have influenced the structure of the US stock market, leading to its current state.
Bio:
Allison Bishop is the President and co-founder of Proof Trading, an institutional broker-dealer for US equities, as well as a part-time visiting professor at City College. She is an appointed member of the board of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, and the creator of the annual Conference for Failed Approaches and Insightful Losses in cryptology (CFAIL). She was formerly a quantitative researcher at IEX (the stock exchange featured in Michael Lewis' book "Flash Boys") and an assistant professor of computer science at Columbia University. Her primary areas of research include stock market microstructure, applied machine learning, and cryptography.
