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Comment by gtsnexp | Hacker News Reader

Fast forward to today, high-frequency trading shops in Europe are investing in software-defined radio and FPGA technology to shave off microseconds in trade execution. This quest for speed mirrors the impact of the original cable. The core takeaway is simple: advancements in communication technology can drastically improve market efficiency and connectivity, transforming local markets into global ones almost overnight.

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do you know of any references that explains what benefits to society are provided by high frequency trading?

i did some crypto hopping myself and made a few grand and then lost most of it when the market crashed a while back and then eventually broke even and made a small profit, but other than the thrill, of course it didn't do any good to the planet. I get the impression a stock trading at faster than the days-months time scale is equally useless for society itself?

Ooh, thats a rabbit hole I want to look into. Do you have any good places to start on the whole SDR and FPGA = profit?

I think most of this is highly proprietary and well-guarded know-how. Optiver in Amsterdam was hiring RF and FPGA folks not long ago.

Not quite the educational content you're looking for, but you might enjoy the film 'The Hummingbird Project'. It's the story of two cousins who work in high-frequency trading attempting to lay a perfectly straight fibre optic cable from Kansas to New Jersey. It's more about the morals of their increasingly desperate and underhanded actions to complete the project, but there's plenty of mostly-realistic technical scenes too. From memory there's considerations about fibre optics vs radio, how to shave milliseconds off those links, and of course the engineering challenge of drilling a ~1000 mile tunnel.

Check out the Sniper in Mahwah blog. Most of this space is proprietary, but the author uncovers a lot of the landscape from public records.

nanoseconds sometimes

But really milliseconds in the case of intercontinental trading, when comparing radio waves and fiberoptics – the speed of light in fiber is about 30% lower than in a vacuum (or relatively thin atmosphere), so skipping it and going directly through the atmosphere is significantly faster, given the distances involved!

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