The 500 Millisecond Advantage

Reminds me of a story where one of the major investment banks figured out (with some pretty advanced statistical models) that certain buyers of stocks set bought in certain intervals to avoid getting pushed up into a higher price. For example, say Sun Life was to buy 100k stocks of Microsoft stock. Rather than buying all 100k at once for a price of 23.45 - 23.60 per stock they would split it up into 5 orders of 20k stock that would execute on the 11th minute of the hour. The investment bank would see what was going on, based on Sun's past actions, and would temporarily long MSFT stock for 60 seconds before the order went through and make a tiny bit of profit.

I'm not sure why you would link the info graphic and not the article it came from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html

All this is total dark magic to me.

"500 milliseconds" sounds so much faster than "half a second".

i've heard about this practice of traders "front running" a client's large trades to that will move the market quite a few times, and the story is almost always followed by something like "and now he's run off to {insert somehwere low-key and nice} and bought a boat"