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Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

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31–40 of 85 posts

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#31
post #30
post #27

If I was regulating the markets I would introduce a random ~100ms delay into all transactions.

The company who has the best latency would still beat the competitors.

Are you sure about that? They would on average perhaps be a slight bit faster, but if the randomized delays are an order of magnitude larger than the latency, they may not be able to do anything useful with that advantage.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#32
post #30
post #27

If I was regulating the markets I would introduce a random ~100ms delay into all transactions.

The company who has the best latency would still beat the competitors.

They could collect all issued transactions in a ~100ms time window, process them in a randomized order, and publish new prices after that.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#34
post #27

If I was regulating the markets I would introduce a random ~100ms delay into all transactions.

The IEX stock exchange uses fibre to introduce a fixed delay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEX

"This 350 microsecond delay adds a round-trip delay of 0.0007 seconds and is designed to negate the certain speed advantages utilized by some high-frequency trader"

I watched this short video about it too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#35
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machines help humans. The bid/ask spread on a $100 share in 1970 as $5. Now it's $0.003 cents and it will continue to narrow, saving you and I money.

How big would it be if we limited machine trading such that milliseconds don't matter? Say run everything with 1Hz frequency instead?

It would be much wider, because the dumber your pricing, the less certain you can be about how the price may move, so you have to be more cautious and quote wider.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#37
post #22
post #8

It's weird that we've set up a stock market for machines rather than humans, where ever-faster bots interpose themselves between slightly slower bots, all the way up to the original buyer and seller, who are probably bots as well.

This all sounds so perverse to me. There are so many obviously brilliant people working on these things. Why aren't they doing something productive with their time? Fighting climate change, educating uneducated, feeding the unfed. All the energy and rare and bloody minerals that are being put into these radios, all the drinking water that will be forever tainted after having been used to produce the semiconductors ne…

Apparently, because they get well paid and get huge budgets to have high tech fun.

Unfortunately, most people don't reflect too deeply on the social consequences of their choice of employment.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#38
post #32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company who has the best latency would still beat the competitors.

They could collect all issued transactions in a ~100ms time window, process them in a randomized order, and publish new prices after that.

This mechanism ("batch auctions") are not immune to rewarding low-latency connections. The details depend on the exact auction mechanism but the general idea is that you want to join the batch as late as possible (at any moment in time when you make a decision to join the batch, you are never worse off if you wait a while before joining) and low-latency connections can afford to join later.

In fact with your exact proposal, assuming everyone has a connection with at most (say) 50ms latency, no one will join the batch in the first 50ms, which (I think) magnifies the low-latency advantage.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#39
post #22
post #8

It's weird that we've set up a stock market for machines rather than humans, where ever-faster bots interpose themselves between slightly slower bots, all the way up to the original buyer and seller, who are probably bots as well.

This all sounds so perverse to me. There are so many obviously brilliant people working on these things. Why aren't they doing something productive with their time? Fighting climate change, educating uneducated, feeding the unfed. All the energy and rare and bloody minerals that are being put into these radios, all the drinking water that will be forever tainted after having been used to produce the semiconductors ne…

> Why aren't they doing something productive with their time?

Why is it any of your business how other people spend their time? There's no objective standard for morality.

>To make the roulette wheel run a little faster? I don't understand it.

Maybe try learning a bit about how markets work and the service they provide. Your criticism makes as much sense as somebody with no familiarity with the software industry complaining about encryption researchers wasting their time enabling child abuse.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#40
post #31
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The company who has the best latency would still beat the competitors.

Are you sure about that? They would on average perhaps be a slight bit faster, but if the randomized delays are an order of magnitude larger than the latency, they may not be able to do anything useful with that advantage.

wouldn't it be like this?

If the delays are randomized then you have as good as chance of getting them as your competitors. On delayed times you will have a bad chance of winning, but in comparison to others with the same delays your latency beats theirs, on non-delayed times your latency beats non-delayed competitors and really beats delayed competitors.

Thus in the end the best latency should win biggest on non-delayed trades, and on delayed trades lose least.

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