New supercomputer to shake up Mexican stock exchange

Global Business

A new supercomputer is changing the way to trade and sell stocks in Mexico. It is the creation of a 32-year-old mostly self-taught engineer.

CCTV’S Martin Markovits has this report.

He never graduated from college, but Alberto Alonso has created a supercomputer, Breogan, that has the ability to modernize Mexico’s antiquated stock market.

Since it was launched in February, the Breogan computer has generated $475,000 for his company GACS. The algorithm it uses is much faster than the computers in Mexico’s stock exchange.

“It’s very fast in terms of the processing,” Alonso said. We have a lot of power to process all the prices at the same time. Its like if we have 1,000 traders at the same time to look at the market and make trades.”

What makes the Breogan computer so unique, is that it finds attractive opportunities in the market and it buys and sells automatically when it sees a trading opportunity. In many cases, traders in Mexico’s stock exchange still use the phone when making transactions.

One of the reasons the machine has been successful is because of the volatility of the peso. Mexico’s currency is weaker than the dollar and the stock exchange allows people to buy American company stocks in pesos.

Alonso said he believes his computer will soon find a home in Mexico’s brokerage firms. He said it is one-tenth of the cost of similar computers built by Dell and other commercial firms. The machine is seen as a potential boom for the Mexican stock exchange, which is not as modernized as its counterparts in New York and Europe.

Although it is the second largest stock market after São Paulo, the number of companies there are far fewer companies traded in Mexico than on Wall Street, which may be why they have been resistant to change.

“There is no need for them to embrace that change. For what? It’s very expensive it works that way and everything is fine, so why bother,” Juan Carlos Minero, chief executive of Black Wall Street Capital Mexico, said. “If they don’t want to make the necessary adjustments, so be it.”

Alonso said the Breogan computer is not fully operational yet, but he hopes to improve and sell it to European and Asian markets in the future.