Commercially available quantum technology could let stock traders coordinate decisions to buy or sell nearly instantaneously using a technique called “quantum telepathy”, potentially disrupting the stock market

Quantum technology could shake up the stock market. Traders working at distant stock exchanges could coordinate decisions to buy or sell nearly instantaneously by using entanglement to create a phenomenon called “quantum telepathy” – and all the quantum devices they would need to implement this scheme already exist.

This takes advantage of a counterintuitive phenomenon that Albert Einstein dubbed “[spooky action at a distance](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234921-800-how-quantum-entanglement-really-works-and-why-we-accept-its-weirdness/)”, in which two quantum particles can influence each other instantaneously across large distances. In the 1960s, physicist John Bell devised a test to confirm that our world really can support such non-local correlations, and [experiments that followed](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730373-600-quantum-weirdness-proved-real-in-first-loophole-free-experiment/) his work cemented spooky action as a reality. They also opened the door for even stranger scenarios where particles seem to collude without having to communicate.

Now, independent researcher [Dawei Ding](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=BsO2ghYAAAAJ&hl=en) and [Liang Jiang](https://pme.uchicago.edu/faculty/liang-jiang) at the University of Chicago in Illinois argue that this kind of quantum entanglement can be used to gain advantages in the [stock market](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2438801-cosmic-rays-can-help-synchronise-the-global-financial-system/), using only devices that are already commercially available.

“The equipment [that you would need] is very simple. These Bell experiments have been done since the 1970s so it’s very standard equipment. You see it in a lot of laboratories,” says Ding.

He and Jiang considered high-frequency trading where trades happen in as little as millionths of a second. In their mathematical model, a high-frequency stock trader named Zhuo operates on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and NASDAQ. The data centres of these stock exchanges are 56.3 kilometres apart. Zhuo has a physical server at each data centre, each of which modifies its selling and buying decisions only based on local information it receives at that exchange.

For the two servers to coordinate decisions, however, one must contact the other. The fastest that information can travel between them is at the speed of light, which would take 188 microseconds, or enough time for dozens of trades to be made. Ding says this delay could be minimised to just the time it takes to detect a particle’s state if the two servers coordinated through what he and Jiang have called quantum telepathy – it is also known as [quantum pseudotelepathy](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25634171-200-how-to-beat-your-family-at-board-games-with-quantum-tricks/), a term coined a few decades ago by physicist Alain Tapp, as there is no actual telepathy occurring.

We have absolutely no indication at this point that there is anyway around the no Communication rule. All experiments on spooky action at a distance involve standard communication to verify the results. Either the scientist quoted in the article were knowingly misquoted, or are knowingly bullshitting.

If quantum tech enabled faster than light information transfer, it would break *causality*. The stock market would be the least of our worries.