FPGAs excel in parallelizing very simple operations. One example where FPGAs are good is where you might want to look for a specific string in a network packet. Because FPGAs are electronic circuits you can replicate the "match a byte" logic thousands of times and have those comparisons all run in parallel and the results combined with AND & OR gates into a yes/no decision. (I think the HFT crowd do this sort of thing to preclassify network packets before forwarding candidate packets up to software layers to do the full decision making).