She stepped inside. “No. It was worse. It was inattention . You built a machine that rewarded you for not caring who stood on the other side of the trade.”
Silence.
But Elena had spent three months in the dusty server logs of the Houston back office. She knew what the algorithm did every Friday at 4:01 PM. It didn’t just rebalance. It leaned . It bought front-month futures just as the physical traders for the parent company were exiting. The spread was microscopic—a penny here, two pennies there. But magnified across 200,000 contracts, the premium became a tax. etp premium
The room went cold.