Saving Seconds Is Better Than Hours

For nearly eight years, I spent almost every day sitting behind a wall of computer screens. I was a high-frequency trader, and my job was to create algorithms that would trade billions of dollars in stocks at microsecond speeds—trying to capture fractions of a penny of mathematical price discrepancies.

Over time, these algorithms would generate millions of dollars in profit for the bank I was working for. Everything I did was based on math and data. I hardly knew anything about the...