The terms originate from the era when stock market trades were executed via paper carried by hand between trading desks. The routine business of hand-carrying client orders between desks would normally proceed at a walking pace, but a broker could literally run in front of the walking traffic to reach the desk and execute his own personal account order immediately before a large client order. [1]
Eg https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...
I've worked for an options market maker, chasing nanoseconds of latency improvements. If you want racks in the exchange data center, you have to pay more to be on one side of the room vs. the other, because the latency improvement for being a couple hundred feet closer actually matters.
https://hackaday.com/2018/05/12/hft-on-hf-you-cant-beat-it-f...
https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/ (Many people who work in HFT are quite familiar with it.)
It's an entertaining and fascinating "view of the inside."
Front running is where you get information about a trade before the trade happens, illegally, and get your own trade in first with advance knowledge that you should not have. That's still 100% against the law whether a computer is involved or not. Do it and you will go to jail. If you got your information from the public market because it is a thing that already happened, then ok. That is really just fine. Other laws might be being broken somehow in other ways or they might not but seriously that's the whole point of a public market and using public information. Everyone has the chance to react as fast as they can.
In the case of this sort of information-speed arbitrage you're not making any stock analysis decisions, you just know an index has to respond a precise way to the stocks within it, and you're able to beat this information to the exchange and buy it ahead of the change.
An analogy would be to redefine all killings (lawful or otherwise) as "murder". It's not helpful. Words have specific meanings in specific contexts, so lets stop overloading them so much when we don't have to.
I hope this clears things up.
i imagine this will be true for a while (i.e. the practical throughput of sneakernet in many cases will keep outpacing the practical throughput of wired and wireless networks, probably for a long time).
It's interesting, but I don't think it stands out as "comical" from the finance realm, given that programmers unironically talk about "race" conditions during the "handshakes" from "tunneling" with a "certificate" in order to to "serve" up "pages".
On a far-more-obscure note, the etymology of "computer" itself can be traced back towards "something which counts using small pebbles of limestone."