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The data are printed with the CME's and NYSE's official timestamps. It would not be unprecedented for the CME's timestamps to diverge from, say, the NYSE's. That would present itself as a consistent temporal dislocation between the CME and NYSE, but would be invisible within each data-set (sort of like your calendar putting itself into the wrong time-zone where - the times are off, but they're consistently off, i.e. spacing between events is preserved).

Instead, we see a signal within each dataset and symmetry between them. It could still be a data aberration, but that would implicate the CME and NYSE of having irregular clocks, a far more serious problem than some twat front-running a government report.

Most likely is that this is a real trading signal, but not one based on insider information.

Relative timestamps between venues don't matter. More importantly, using timestamps without a common reference point makes it impossible to assert what happened first, because the absolute value of the timestamp does not matter. What matters is what "really" happened first. Of course, everyone's view of "first" can differ, but that's a different issue.

Whether there is signal here or not wasn't my point. There may well could be. My point was simply that the analysis provided by Nanex is spurious without a definition of the timestamps, where they came from, and their relationship to known reference points. Taking three events with a timestamp from each of: CQS, CME, and an arbitrary point in time such as 10:30:00 and then asserting that events observed within a CQS or CME event stream happened "before" the arbitrary point in time, 10:30:00, is impossible.

Unless either (a) one observes CQS, CME, and the event scheduled for 10:30:00 from a known reference and accounts for all variables (differing transit latencies, etc) or (b) each of the generating events are known synchronized and the current state of that synchronization is observable (CQS lags CME by 475us, government event source leads CME by 1.2ms, etc). Clearing (b) is not happening today. (a) can be accomplished by Nanex, if they so choose.

"(a) can be accomplished by Nanex, if they so choose."

Doing so doesn't give them a sensationalist headline that finds its way to the top of HN.

What I find amazing is that a government agency managed to publish a report at a specific time, to the millisecond, using somebody else's clock.

The clock's probably derived from GPS or NIST or USNO anyway, so it actually is the government's clock.

I've seen exchanges screw up clock time more often than I care to remember, often for the stupidest reason. I once had an exchange claim it was "due to a roofing contractor accidentally interfering with the satellite used to get a GPS time signal".

I would think that exchanges would be one of the few places on earth to nail clock time because they are so dependent on it.

Network syncing time is hard, my team (at a bank) built our own infrastructure to monitor time sync errors on our own internal servers, we synced externally with two independent clocks. An atomic clock in London and NIST in the US. But we also modelled the exchange's time as well.

We had six independent connections to the exchange (hitting different servers) and we'd reverse engineered the exchanges internal infrastructure so based upon the timing of their messages, the tcp packet headers and their own timestamps we knew exactly what clocks their internal servers were running on (more valuably in our case is it also gave us their internal latency figures). Half the time we knew when their clocks were drifting before they did and could tell them which internal server had the wrong time.

This stuff is hard, you need to know a lot about network latency and time to make sure you're doing it right (have a look at the NTP spec for starters), there's probably only a handful of people in the world who are capable of nailing it and probably most of them work in the military or atomic physics research labs.

> This stuff is hard, you need to know a lot about network latency and time to make sure you're doing it right (have a look at the NTP spec for starters), there's probably only a handful of people in the world who are capable of nailing it and probably most of them work in the military or atomic physics research labs.

Funnily enough, Google appeared to have made it work well enough for a distributed database: http://research.google.com/archive/spanner.html

Google doesn't necessarily need nano second or sub nano second resolution.

True.

There are clearly 2 spiking in trading, 400ms apart, skew between the CGS and EIA systems doesn't explain that.

It's just an algo designed to run before the release.. see my post below.

Since Hacker News uses a dynamic sorting algorithm for comments, "below" can quickly become "above". It's best to just say something with a link, like, "See my post elsewhere in this thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5147300)."

I was once like you, young and innocent :)

For some perspective, checkout GOOG's intraday movement between 2006-2009. It was the trader's dream come true.

Then you took an arrow to the knee?

Please try to keep comments constructive on Hacker News. Memes and other forms of joke regurgitation don't really fit in here.

I would say the same to you.

le

This is the first time I heard about that meme, which means your comment contained the most usable information I gained across all comments in this thread.

Then you will probably find knowyourmeme.com to be educational and edifying ;). HN, however, is not usually where I want to find out about these things, especially when they're so wholly tangential.

I am not universally interested in all memes, but I liked this particular one. Also, it isn't content-free, it exists for a reason.

With a very corrupted definition of "usable".