MeatSpace avatars for our new machine overlords at Latour Trading, LLC visiting the NYSE, on Sept. 20, 2011, in celebration of the company's NYSE and Amex equity membership. (GIF: Charles Benson-Hearst, Source: NYSE Euronext)

FOR YEARS Goldman Sachs has been the dominant player in algorithmic trading and, in particular, the high-frequency trading (HFT) market, boasting the largest and (arguably) most successful ‘automated trading’ operation on Wall Street.

It’s exactly as Skynet-dangerous as it sounds: a bunch of computer programs, coded by errant mathematicians and physicists and responsible for making mega-trades 24/7, often without adult supervision. Think back to the awesomely named May 6, 2010 “Flash Crash” when the Dow plunged about 1000 points—the biggest one-day, intraday point decline in its history—only to recover those losses within minutes.

But, Goldman’s supremacy in robo trading wavered this week, with the NYSE’s weekly program trading report unveiling a shadowy new top firm, Latour Trading, LLC. Its website is completely blank, but the firm is closely tied to David Faucon, the man who developed French Bank Societe Generale’s first HFT program. Faucon is also a co-owner and former employee of scandal-plagued Tower Research Capital.

Here’s the gist: Latour’s website is registered to Alex Shender of Tower Research Capital. It has the same phone number and address as Tower Research Capital. (Latour’s on the 10th floor, Tower’s on the 11th floor.) It’s CEO, according to NYSE Euronext, is David Faucon, the man who left SocGen for a position as a principle at Tower Research after designing SocGen’s original HFT software.

Here’s where it gets weird: Last fall, another former SocGen employee, a 27-year-old Indian citizen named Samarth Agrawal, was accused of stealing their current HFT code on behalf of his new employer, Tower Research Capital. When Agrawal’s lawyer asked the government’s first witness, a former Tower partner, why Agrawal had been hired, the partner testified that Agrawal had been courted, partially, to create an in-house competitor to David Faucon.  Last March, Agrawal was sentenced to 3 years in prison for stealing SocGen’s HFT code. (His lousy defense: His bosses at SocGen had asked him to print the code out, so he could study it at home.)

So: What in the heck is going on around here, you guys?

Is Tower Research secretly trying to use SocGen’s new code through Latour—without courting legal action against their actual company? OR: Have Faucon and his old SocGen-inspired HFT simply been spun-off and put to pasture, only to rise on their own merits? How the heck is a $400 million dollar company like Latour handling trade volumes on par with “supreme ruler of the world,” Goldman Sachs? Will Latour start donating as much money to New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer as Goldman Sachs does? And what about John Connor!?!? Who is gonna save him from T-1000 when Latour invents high-frequency time travel?!?! FLASH CRASH AND BURN, MAN! FLASH CRASH AND BURN!

Probably the most infuriatingly smart-ass part: Latour shares its name with French sociologist and anthropologist Bruno Latour, co-developer of Actor-Network Theory “best known for its controversial insistence on the agency of nonhumans.” You know nonhumans: fruit flies; reindeer; giant, complicated pieces of financial trading software.

It kind of reminds me of the time all those alpha-male quants started simultaneously inflating the housing bubble and putting up massive short bets against the real estate market. They named their company Magnetar Capital, after a poorly-understood neutron star whose matter-sucking properties are similar to a black hole.

Be gentle with us this time, please, elite market overlords. Just because we all don’t have math and physics degrees doesn’t mean we don’t have feelings.

[Research thanks to about a million commenters at Zero Hedge. At your convenience, please enjoy this truly unsettling TED Talk about trading algorithms.]

Tags: #ows, class war, Goldman Sachs, Jerks, Latour, Mysteries, Samarth Agrawal, Societe Generale, Tower Research Capital