I'd be curious to hear some statistics on how much money a ~10ms difference in time of information received can actually make.
I built a trading platform ~6 years ago that had a 100 microsecond tick to trade (a term that means from the time a market update hits your nic to the time an order leaves your nic).
We knew then that we were too slow for large swaths of the HFT space & wouldn’t even attempt those trades.
I haven’t kept up with the industry but I’d guess tick to trade times at the speed edge are in the low hundreds of nanos now. In an environment like that a 1ms time improvement is out of the capabilities of your software/hardware engineers and can only happen at the network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5cZaIZ5bWc
And that was more than 6 years ago, one ticker symbol only. You can imagine now.
That gave me a much better sense of scale than hearing "a trade takes 200ns" or whatever. The engineering that goes into making this possible must be just insane.
In trading you're not calculating nearly as much stuff.
In trading it's probably very sharp, the line between making and losing money. You want to be under 100us for sure. That's micros. Depends on what you're doing of course but 10ms is OOM to slow.