How can you allow the trading companies to locate computers

Host: The city skyline at night pulsed like a living circuit — windows glowing, screens flickering, the rhythm of capital flashing in invisible waves. Beneath that metallic constellatory glow, deep inside a high-rise server room, rows of humming machines breathed like sleeping beasts. The air was cold, too cold — the engineered chill of efficiency.

Host: The clock on the wall showed 2:47 a.m. — a time when money moved fastest, unseen.

Host: Jack stood in front of a glass rack of servers, the faint blue light reflecting in his grey eyes. Jeeny sat on a swivel chair nearby, scrolling through a dense column of market data on her tablet. The numbers moved like rain — fast, relentless, impersonal.

Host: Between them, on the screen of one idle terminal, a quote glowed in stark black and white:

“How can you allow the trading companies to locate computers closer to exchanges and flash millions of bids to give an unfair advantage?... Even professionals are losing faith in some aspects of the system.”
— Mario Gabelli

Jeeny: “You know, for a man who built an empire on investing, that’s almost… elegiac.”

Jack: “Yeah. A lament from the temple of capitalism itself.”

Jeeny: “Faith, he says. Losing faith.” She looks up from the tablet. “Isn’t that the irony? That in a system built entirely on numbers, belief was always the currency that mattered most?”

Jack: “Belief and bandwidth.”

Host: The servers hummed louder, as if hearing themselves invoked. The floor vibrated faintly beneath their feet. Somewhere deep inside, algorithms were already at work — making decisions faster than thought, faster than conscience.

Jack: “Gabelli’s right. The game’s broken. You’ve got machines trading in nanoseconds, predicting patterns before human eyes can blink. The system rewards proximity — not intelligence, not risk, not even luck anymore.”

Jeeny: “It’s evolution,” she said softly. “Survival of the fastest.”

Jack: “Speed without soul. Progress without principle.”

Jeeny: “You say that like it’s new. Finance has always worshiped advantage — this is just the next altar.”

Jack: “No, this is different. Before, a human heartbeat still mattered. A hesitation, a gut feeling — those could change the outcome. Now? You blink and you’re obsolete.”

Host: The lights flickered as the servers cycled, a strobing pulse of artificial life. Jeeny’s face glowed pale blue in the light.

Jeeny: “Maybe what we’re really losing faith in isn’t the system — it’s ourselves. The idea that human judgment still has any place in a world of perfect data.”

Jack: “Data’s not perfect. It’s just faster at being wrong.”

Jeeny: smiling faintly “That’s poetic, Jack. Maybe even true.”

Jack: “Look at this,” he said, pulling up a graph on the monitor — a jagged waveform of market activity. “Every spike here? That’s an algorithm outbidding itself, trying to stay ahead by microseconds. It’s not even strategy anymore — it’s reflex.”

Jeeny: “Like muscle memory without a brain.”

Jack: “Exactly. We’ve automated greed — and now it runs on clock speed.”

Host: The sound of the cooling fans rose to a drone, like wind through iron trees. A single green light blinked steadily on one of the processors, rhythmically, like a heartbeat trying to mimic life.

Jeeny: “Do you think he meant it literally — that professionals are losing faith? Or was he warning us that the system itself runs on faith, and once that’s gone…”

Jack: “It collapses.”

Jeeny: “Like a religion without believers.”

Jack: “Or a casino after dawn.”

Host: He turned away from the screen, the reflection of data still flickering in his pupils. Outside, through the glass wall, the city shimmered — a cathedral of transactions, its towers glowing with invisible prayers for profit.

Jeeny: “It’s strange,” she said, “we built these machines to make us richer, smarter, faster — but all they did was strip away the illusion that any of us are in control.”

Jack: “And yet we still call it ‘the market.’ Like it’s a place. Like there’s a person to appeal to, or a god to appease.”

Jeeny: “There is. The algorithm. And it never sleeps.”

Host: A silence settled between them — not peaceful, but electric, as if the room itself was thinking.

Jeeny: “You know what’s really terrifying?”

Jack: “What?”

Jeeny: “That even the programmers don’t understand what their creations are doing anymore. It’s all emergent behavior — systems teaching themselves how to cheat faster than we can catch them.”

Jack: “That’s not finance anymore. That’s theology.”

Jeeny: “How so?”

Jack: “Because belief still drives it. Not belief in money — in control. In the myth that somewhere inside all this noise, someone knows what’s going on.”

Host: Outside, a lightning flash illuminated the skyline — an instant snapshot of humanity’s architecture, glowing against the storm.

Jeeny: “You make it sound apocalyptic.”

Jack: “It’s not apocalypse. It’s acceleration. We built gods that run on code, and now they make offerings of us.”

Jeeny: “So you agree with Gabelli — that even the professionals have lost faith?”

Jack: “No,” he said quietly. “I think they’ve traded faith for speed. They still believe — just not in fairness, not in reason. They believe in winning before anyone else even knows the game started.”

Jeeny: “But what happens when no one trusts the game?”

Jack: “Then the house burns down — but the servers keep trading ashes.”

Host: The rain began to fall harder, pattering against the glass, turning the city lights into liquid gold. The rhythm almost matched the subtle, mechanical heartbeat of the machines around them — the pulse of a system still alive, still relentless.

Jeeny: “Maybe that’s what he meant by ‘unfair advantage.’ Not just physical proximity — moral proximity. How close people are willing to stand to corruption before they call it progress.”

Jack: “And how easily we call faith naïveté once profit gets optimized.”

Jeeny: “So what’s left? What happens after faith dies?”

Jack: looking out at the skyline “Silence. Then maybe a different kind of belief — not in systems, but in limits.”

Host: The servers hummed steadily, their blue glow flickering like constellations trapped in glass. Beyond them, the city continued to breathe — indifferent, metallic, beautiful in its exhaustion.

Host: And in that electric silence, Gabelli’s words felt less like criticism and more like prophecy:

“How can you allow the trading companies to locate computers closer to exchanges and flash millions of bids to give an unfair advantage?... Even professionals are losing faith in some aspects of the system.”

Host: Because in a world that moves faster than trust,
faith isn’t lost — it’s overwritten.

Host: Every flicker of code is a confession,
every trade a prayer whispered to a god of silicon and greed.

Host: And as the night wore on,
Jack and Jeeny stood beneath the hum of those man-made deities,
watching faith dissolve into speed —
and truth into latency.

Host: Outside, the rain kept falling —
a quiet audit from the sky.