Take the Office Computer Out for a Beer After Work

Here is a article about how "computer-powered trend-following hedge funds" are increasingly following trends into "less liquid, more exotic markets ... like Brazilian and Czech interest rate derivatives, natural gas, uranium funds and even cheese and milk contracts," where returns are better than in more traditional markets. (Presumably all the trend-followers following the trend into trend-following in traditional markets have dissipated the returns to trend-following there, while trend-following in exotic markets has only just become trendy.) One simple story about the computerization of stock markets is that you'd expect it to start in extremely liquid stuff where there is tons of data and not much friction involved in implementing an idea derived from that data, and then move on to places where data is sparser and trading is more difficult, and that seems to be happening here.

Another story about computerization is that you'd expect computers to do a lot of analytical grunt work, freeing up humans to do higher-level thinking and add more value. In a sense that story is implicit in every article like this -- the humans, after all, are the ones who decided to apply their computerized strategies to milk trading or whatever -- but there's also the hint of the opposite story too: