On Sunday, iconic TV news show “60 Minutes” did a very interesting segment on the phenomenon known as “high-frequency trading.” The piece gave a detailed account of the fact that most stock trades in the United States are no longer made by actual human traders. Most trades actually are placed by robot computers capable of buying and selling thousands of different securities in the time it took you to read this sentence.

The “60 Minutes” segment showed how supercomputers actually decide which stocks to buy and sell, based on the proprietary, and highly secretive, instructions programmed into them by Wall Street math wizards. The broadcast also showed how high-frequency trading played a distinct role in exacerbating the “flash crash” that took the Dow down some 600 points in about 15 minutes on May 6.

I think that the “60 Minutes” story is a must watch for every investor, as the producers did what I thought was a very good job of covering the issue from several important angles. If you have any money in the market, or if you ever plan to have any money in the market, then watching the “60 Minutes” piece is time well spent.