I assume that Diana Ross was singing about love. But she could quite as easily have been predicting the rise of high-frequency trading. Because, truly, there ain’t no mountain high enough nor no river wide enough to keep intrepid firms from shaving fractions of a second off their trading times.

I am speaking, I assure you, quite literally. Last year, service providers blasted through the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania to lay a new fibre optic cable between Chicago and New York, the two main financial centres in the US.