The Hummingbird Project Trailer #1 (2019) | Dynamic Trailers

The Hummingbird Project 2019

Cousins Vincent and Anton are players in the high-stakes game of high-frequency trading, where winning is measured in milliseconds. Their dream is to build a straight fibre-optic cable line between Kansas and New Jersey, making them millions, but nothing is straightforward for this flawed pair. Anton is the brains, Vincent is the hustler, and together they push each other and everyone around them to the breaking point with their daring adventure.

Initial release: March 22, 2019 (Canada)

Director: Kim Nguyen

Box office: 561,671 USD

Nominations: Canadian Screen Award for Achievement in Visual Effects, MORE

Awards: Canadian Screen Award for Best Achievement in Overall Sound

The Hummingbird Project is a 2018 Canadian-Belgian drama thriller film about high-frequency trading and ultra-low latency direct market access, written and directed by Kim Nguyen produced by Pierre Even at Item 7. It stars Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Salma Hayek, and Michael Mando.

It had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2018. It was released in the United States on March 15, 2019, by The Orchard and was released on March 22, 2019 in Canada by Elevation Pictures.

The film opens as stockbroker Vincent Zaleski pitches Bryan Taylor on investing in a fiberoptic cable from Kansas electronic exchange to the New York Stock Exchange in order to front run orders in a new high-frequency trading (HFT) operation. Taylor buys into the idea. Meanwhile, Vincent and his cousin Anton Zaleski are still employed by Eva Torres, where Anton programs trading software. Eva is also working on several ideas for HFT. Soon enough, Anton and Vincent quit, making Eva furious. She insists that any code Anton created for her firm belongs to it, and even the thoughts in his head might be proprietary.

Vincent has hired Mark Vega to oversee the building of the fiberoptic cable tunnel. Vincent occasionally helps Mark purchase or lease the rights to land in order to make the cable as straight as possible. Any deviation in the shape of the tunnel will create delays in the trade. Anton is hard at work trying to shave 1 millisecond off the time it takes to front-run orders to NYC. Currently, his software will do it in 17 milliseconds, which is not fast enough to be competitive. It needs to be at least 16 milliseconds to be a viable enterprise for Taylor's firm.

Eva finds an NYU student who has written a paper about microwave pulses to effect HFT. She hires him, and starts the process of building a series of towers to make trades with microwaves. As Vincent struggles with everything from acquiring land, being diagnosed with cancer, and broken drill bits, Eva manages to finish her microwave towers first, and begins front-running the market.

Eva also takes revenge on Anton by having him arrested by the FBI for stock market fraud by using stolen property in the form of the software that he wrote for her company. While in jail, a software bug that Anton had planted in Eva's firm is unleashed, causing a 20 millisecond slowdown in trades, rendering her microwaves useless. She drops the charges against Anton.

As Vincent undergoes chemotherapy, Anton reveals his next idea for HFT involves neutrino messaging, and it could cut the time from Kansas to NYC down to as little as 9 milliseconds.