Skip to main content

Alessio Sancetta and Francesco Feri win a Leverhulme grant to study the dissemination of information in high frequency trading

Alessio Sancetta and Francesco Feri win a Leverhulme grant to study the dissemination of information in high frequency trading

  • Date10 December 2021

The Department of Economics is delighted to announce that Alessio Sancetta and Francesco Feri won a Leverhulme grant to study the dissemination of information in high frequency trading. The main goal of the project is to study information dissemination through the interaction of machines and humans in financial markets.

stock market

Machines in the form of algorithms are nowadays an integral part of any financial market. In the last decades, there has been emerging interest in algorithms to make predictions and decisions in financial markets. The project intends to add a new dimension to it by studying the interaction between machines and humans.

The project addresses questions such as:

  • How do human participants react to the presence of algorithms in the market?
  • How is information dissemination within electronic markets affected by the presence of algorithms? Are human and algorithmic traders able to detect the information disseminated in the market? How can they learn from each other? 

  • How does the presence of algorithms affect the dynamics of electronic financial markets? How unstable and manipulatable a market becomes as the proportion of algorithms increases?

  • How well can an algorithm learn from historical data? Can such a trained algorithm adapt to learn from new data from experiments? How well can an algorithm learn to account for its actions when such actions impact the environment? 


To answer these questions, a considerable innovation of the project is the use of economic experiments where participants can be either humans or algorithms trained on high frequency datasets.

Related topics

Explore Royal Holloway

Get help paying for your studies at Royal Holloway through a range of scholarships and bursaries.

There are lots of exciting ways to get involved at Royal Holloway. Discover new interests and enjoy existing ones.

Heading to university is exciting. Finding the right place to live will get you off to a good start.

Whether you need support with your health or practical advice on budgeting or finding part-time work, we can help.

Discover more about our academic departments and schools.

Find out why Royal Holloway is in the top 25% of UK universities for research rated ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’.

Royal Holloway is a research intensive university and our academics collaborate across disciplines to achieve excellence.

Discover world-class research at Royal Holloway.

Discover more about who we are today, and our vision for the future.

Royal Holloway began as two pioneering colleges for the education of women in the 19th century, and their spirit lives on today.

We’ve played a role in thousands of careers, some of them particularly remarkable.

Find about our decision-making processes and the people who lead and manage Royal Holloway today.