Financial Trading At The Speed Of Light | Hacker News Reader

Financial Trading At The Speed Of Light

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21 pointsalexwg16 comments

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But not at the speed of neutrinos in Europe? What's next, Ethernet cables that are longer than six inches?

Man, I came here to make this joke, but you've beaten me to it... and you're the only other comment.

I love HN. <3

It's funny today, but I hope this doesn't happen every time someone references the speed of light from now on.

If necessary, we can go back in time and make sure the discovery doesn't take place.

But only if someone goes back in time after you to make sure that the discovery does take place so that you can go back in time to prevent it.

No way man, I totally know what I'm

I would never do such a thing, unless you were already having been going to do that.

Some market participants are already able to execute trades at FTL speeds.
http://www.nanex.net/Research/fantaseconds/fantaseconds.html
I'd like to use their hardware so that my parallel code can receive messages before they are sent.

I seriously question the quality of nanex infrastructure in general ... they may have had a clock shift (if they left NTP running)

that article is a lot of ass. the timestamps in the packet are generated at the exchange(not on the wire) where its on different physical machines... perfectly reasonable for each machines clock o be a microseccond or two off.. about the resolution of GPS time sync.

They mentioned a lot of colos, but you can actually lease space in the NYSE building itself. You don't get much faster than parking your server next to the one logging the transactions!

From the article:
One reason the high-frequency traders can beat others to the punch is that they often locate their computers in data centers run by the exchanges. The New York Stock Exchange, for example, moved its computer infrastructure last year to a facility it built in Mahwah, N.J., where it also leases space to trading firms. It can command premium prices for that space because close physical proximity means fast access to the exchange's raw trading data. Most other market participants don't see that data until milliseconds later, after it's been consolidated and combined with information from other exchanges.

This underscores the weakness of TFA. "often locate their computers" really should read "always locate their computers" in data centers run by the exchanges. Any high frequency trader that does not is, well, decidedly second tier or worse.

Interesting! The mention of the NYSE wasn't in the article when I read it. Good to see they updated it.

being colocated dosent mean anything if your infrastructure sucks. e.g. what switch(s) you use, which PHYs/transeivers are used, what NICs you use, what kind of cables (fiber/copper) and what kind of hw/sw stack you run on. You might be surprised there`s 10s of nanosecconds difference between a twinax 10Gb copper cable, 0.5M 10Gb SR fiber and a 2M 10Gb SR fiber cable... which does make a difference. The differences between different vendors of NICs.. etc etc.
...this aint no FB/Google/blah.1M.requests.a.minute datacenter - its the latency not the thoughput that matters.

What's funny is that this matters even less than Facebook.

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