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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't matter if you don't advertise orders until the end of the second. There is a whole world of information out there outside if your particular exchange. People trade on that information, so they will wait until the last possible moment before the end of the interval to gather as much of that information as possible.

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But many participants are reacting to small signals only from the exchange, at least at the microseconds and smaller latencies. Real world events are not usually interpreted that fast by humans or computers; typically only market activity is. A greater danger of course when at that micro/nano scale the only information to inform trades is other market action which can cause positive/negative feedback loops between participants - for most market participants outside the HFT's and the like this could be a negative factor to the markets.

Your argument may hold for "real world" information and even then there's probably ways to even the playing field; but I'm not so sure for market information (e.g. momentum trades). Most short term trading is of the latter category except certain dates. After all information asymmetry is something that markets tend to want to reduce.

Then you allow to only make orders a second before they are announced an executed

You just need to make it long enough so that microsecond latency would be diluted by the time it takes to execute the order.

There is human-relevant information being traded and relevant on a microsecond timescale?

Sure.

Something important happens. Whoever reacts the fastest has an edge. I don't really know whether we're measuring "reacts the fastest" in terms of microseconds yet these days, but fastest is fastest no matter how much you win by.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGZa-yf8vMU

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