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Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

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41–50 of 85 posts

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#41
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.

The bots don't take profit, the humans do. They just use bots because bots can help them better achive what they need, much like we may prefer to use a browser to fetch information from the internet rather than physically going down to a library.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-del…

Unless that uncertainty now means that your time and resources is best spent elsewhere than shaving ms off your latency.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#43
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.

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.

This sounds like circular logic to me. It really saves money to people who want to buy and sell often, which has no social value. I think having a penalty for buying and selling too often is a feature, not a bug : we want investors that think long term.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#44
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't like it, but the there is a sensible answer for this. Despite you not liking the stock (and other financial) markets, they do perform a useful and needed task (price discovery, reallocation of resources, reallocation and focusing of human brainpower, reallocation of capital, allowing for investment (allocation of collected capital and resources in the present for future projects, so that they can be achieve…

> And well-functioning capital, labor, idea and resource circulation markets are at the very heart of that system. Sure. But I'd question whether high-frequency trading is a necessary component of that, as opposed to regular-frequency trading. Same as I'd question whether things like collateralized debt obligations and interest-free loans were good for the housing market. "Capitalist civilization" has changed in a nu…

[flagged]

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#45
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…

> There are so many obviously brilliant people working on these things. Why aren't they doing something productive with their time?

You could say the same thing about pushing ads. The fact is that if there’s something that generates money, smart people will gravitate towards it if they can increase margins in a competitive field no matter how useless it might seem.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you, that link already exists several times over. There are dozens of links between Aurora and 350 E Cermak, and dozens more between 350 E Cermak and Cateret, NJ. There's even an entire ISP based off the lowest latency link between Chicago and New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_Networks

What's in Aurora? And why West Chicago in the original article? Amusingly, I grew up 2 towns over from Aurora and live 3 towns from Carteret now.

The CME datacenter is in Aurora, and the ICE datacenter is in Chicago proper.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#47
post #23
post #15

I remain convinced that this is Starlink's short-term customer if their promises are true. They are doing transmission via optical as the crow flies. If they're doing O-O, or even low latency O-E-O, they can beat transatlantic fiber. For HFT houses, that's potentially a major edge.

What happens in the global market if a single person consistently has a timing advantage over every other participant(because the barrier to building a global satellite network is too high/costly for anyone else)? Could Elon come to own the entire market, or is there some limit to the powers of arbitrage?

If a single player was capturing the entire arbitrage market, they'd be earning enough to justify other players building their own satellite network to capture a piece of the pie.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#48

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.

This sounds like circular logic to me. It really saves money to people who want to buy and sell often, which has no social value. I think having a penalty for buying and selling too often is a feature, not a bug : we want investors that think long term.

>which has no social value

Who made you the global arbiter of social value? Clearly the people participating in the transaction see some value in it.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#49
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…

Yes it is perverse indeed. Imagine all the engineering being put into ads, tracking and hft instead of, I dont know, engine emission control or educational programs for kids.

The incentives are all messed up.

Hft could probably be "fixed" by some game rules. Like delaying any request by 10s+-some random delay. Then having an edge of some ms would just be noise.

Re: Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

#50
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't like it, but the there is a sensible answer for this. Despite you not liking the stock (and other financial) markets, they do perform a useful and needed task (price discovery, reallocation of resources, reallocation and focusing of human brainpower, reallocation of capital, allowing for investment (allocation of collected capital and resources in the present for future projects, so that they can be achieve…

> And well-functioning capital, labor, idea and resource circulation markets are at the very heart of that system. Sure. But I'd question whether high-frequency trading is a necessary component of that, as opposed to regular-frequency trading. Same as I'd question whether things like collateralized debt obligations and interest-free loans were good for the housing market. "Capitalist civilization" has changed in a nu…

>> When I look at stats for things like wage disparities, and the amount of money poured into marketing (demand generation), and the amount of frivolous products that the capitalist economy produces because it must by its nature constantly expand production, I quite honestly don't see efficiency and I certainly don't see reason.

Have you considered its alternatives are not much better, if at all?

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