In a kind-of defense of such methods: such technologies do seem crappy when you look at them today, but building good products with bad tools is pretty much in the job description for engineers and even more for experimental scientists. Check a good experimental scientist record of 100-300 years ago and you will be amazed what they did with the tools of the time.

This is not an apples to apples comparison to the spider fight world of trading, but there would still be a lot of ingenuity there. And a simple way to limit risk is to ruthlessly review the results, both automatically and manually. Keep going while it works as expected and stop/adjust if there is a major glitch.

Like the old joke, you just have to outrun the bear. It just had to be better and get to market quicker than the competition. It could probably beat the guys doing it with desktop calculators quite handily. Also, this is the financial services industry: nobody cares how much coke you're snorting if your profits are good.

In the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

A crappy solution was still the best they had at the time. You're going to hate to read what they say about today's solutions in 2028.

You'd be surprised at how much this is still the case.

I remember a while ago there was an article posted here on HN that explained most ATMs are just FTPing txt files back and forth. The amount of fragile, weird systems that underpin our financial world seems deeper every day...

As opposed to another crap solution some small band of programmers could come up with?

If it works...