- The hotly contested subject of high-frequency trading is getting the box-office treatment with a new movie called "The Hummingbird Project," set to hit theaters in March.
- The first theatrical trailer for the film was released on Thursday, and it looks as though it'll be a wild ride.
Rarely is the uber-geeky term "high-frequency trading" put in the same sentence as "thriller," but the writer and director Kim Nguyen is giving it a shot with a new movie called "The Hummingbird Project."
The movie's IMDB page says it "exposes the ruthless edge of our increasingly digital world," a vague description of how stock traders have become so desperate for any advantage that they're constantly trying to speed up trades before the market can catch up. In markets, this is called "front running."
The opening scene of the trailer for "The Hummingbird Project" — which is strikingly similar to the opening pages of Michael Lewis' 2014 book about the same topic, called "Flash Boys" — shows two cousins from New York, Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgard), discussing the logistics of building a straight fiber-optic cable line between Kansas and New Jersey.
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The straighter the line, the better the computer can shave fractions of a millisecond off a trade. In a market where algorithms dominate, executing trades in the blink of an eye matters. A lot.
"Anton is the brains, Vincent is the hustler," the movie's website says, adding, "Constantly breathing down their necks is their old boss Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), a powerful, intoxicating, and manipulative trader who will stop at nothing to come between them and beat them at their own game."
Studios have most likely taken notice of the recent successes of Wall Street movies — notably "The Big Short," based on a book of the same name by Lewis, and "The Wolf of Wall Street."
However, in "Flash Boys," the protagonists are a group of Wall Street guys, led by the real-life trader turned CEO Brad Katsuyama, who tried to change the loopholes that allow speed traders to get an edge and expose what they saw as a rigged system. Netflix will reportedly soon release a movie based on the book.
"The Hummingbird Project" is set to hit select theaters on March 15.
