Editor's Letter - Making a molehill out of a mountain

You can see good examples of this principle at work in the financial services industry when looking at any buy-side firm's front-office environment. The traders, heads of desk and portfolio managers tend only to be interested in how effective their latest algorithm is in working a large block order during the course of the day. How the algorithm actually goes about firing off orders into the market is, frankly, neither here nor there. That it does what it is supposed to do is all that really