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Algorithmic Trading is commonly used by pension funds, mutual funds, and other buy side (investor pushed ) institutional traders, to divide large trades into many smaller transactions in order to handle market effect, and risk.
Sell side traders, such as market makers and some hedge funds, provide liquidity into the market, generating and implementing orders automatically.
A unique class of algorithmic trading is high-frequency trading (HFT), where computers create elaborate decisions to commence orders based on information that's obtained electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information which they observe.