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Chairman Mary L. Schapiro said Thursday the Securities and Exchange Commission is upgrading its investigative technology so that it can identify “suspicious trading patterns and relationships among multiple traders and across multiple securities.’’

Even though, she said, the firms that the regulator oversees “spend more money just on their IT budgets than we spend running our entire agency,’’ she told the 2012 New England Securities Conference in Boston that the SEC will use “newly-developed analytics” to spot abuses.

The securities industry policing agency will “put better technology in the hands of our investigators,’’ she said. “Upgraded technology makes it possible to wade through literally millions of documents and thousands of hours of conversations to find the proverbial needle in a haystack that lets us sew up a case.’’