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Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

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Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#11

Post by zozbot234 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #2

Do exchanges like HF traders? I know HF traders themselves justify their own existence by claiming they provide liquidity to the markets, but I've always just sort-of rolled my eyes at that. They only extract value and provide none, in my opinion, tax the profits heavily. I think every exchange should pad each order by a random number between 0 and 250ms, it would take care of it. The company profiled in this video a…

HFT does enhance liquidity and price discovery. The advantage to being "first" to trade is only there when multiple bidders are issuing orders at the exact same price point, and this is easily addressed by reducing minimum tick size so that price choices will just naturally disperse (as opposed to all being quantized at the same value).

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#12

Post by bob1029 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #2

Do exchanges like HF traders? I know HF traders themselves justify their own existence by claiming they provide liquidity to the markets, but I've always just sort-of rolled my eyes at that. They only extract value and provide none, in my opinion, tax the profits heavily. I think every exchange should pad each order by a random number between 0 and 250ms, it would take care of it. The company profiled in this video a…

Certainly exchanges love all paying customers.

The liquidity argument is a good one IMO. If you did not have participants willing to arbitrage fractions of a cent per share, it could be really difficult to get the ends to meet on a daily basis for things that arent traded with as much volume as monsters like TSLA/AMD/et. al.

The use of microwave links is just a natural consequence of competition within the HFT space. It might be reasonable to apply a minimum latency bound across the board as some participants have already, but I argue this would inhibit much of the innovation that got us to this point to start with. Being able to quickly clear a trade on thinly-traded securities is a wonderful thing for all involved. Capital not locked up in limit orders is more useful to humanity (in most cases).

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#13

Post by hervature »

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #8
cryptofistMonk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the exchanges like the buckets of money that HFTs pay them, even on their discounted commission fees. There's also billions in industry just around supporting HFTs, including FPGAs, silicon fab, networking equipment, etc. The cost to society of killing HFTs would probably be fairly large and imo the drawbacks are mostly minor.

All of the money HFTs make would have been made by other investors, presumably for reasons more related to predicting or responding to actual changes in market conditions. HFTs are parasites that basically leech value from those trades by executing them faster than you can, and forcing you to buy at a higher/sell at a lower price. I think the platonic ideal of a marketplace involves making money by determining the ac…

I don't like these type of comments because they show little understanding of how the market works.

Explain the process in which the HFT firms "leech value" from your trades or "[steal] information and [jump] the line"? Your trade arrives at the exchange. Then, the HFT firms learn about your trade. They then price correct many instruments and derivatives that are all inter-related.

Now, if we are talking about quote stuffing or intentionally trying to DDoS exchanges, everyone agrees this is bad behavior and is regulated against.

Finally, as you mention, these type of algorithms contributed to market instability of the flash crash but it was also initiated by large (slow) directional bets. You propose taking the oxygen out of the room of a fire but one can also propose removing matches that started the fire.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#14

Post by nickff »

vladTheInhaler wrote: post #8
cryptofistMonk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the exchanges like the buckets of money that HFTs pay them, even on their discounted commission fees. There's also billions in industry just around supporting HFTs, including FPGAs, silicon fab, networking equipment, etc. The cost to society of killing HFTs would probably be fairly large and imo the drawbacks are mostly minor.

All of the money HFTs make would have been made by other investors, presumably for reasons more related to predicting or responding to actual changes in market conditions. HFTs are parasites that basically leech value from those trades by executing them faster than you can, and forcing you to buy at a higher/sell at a lower price. I think the platonic ideal of a marketplace involves making money by determining the ac…

It's also possible that HFTs make less money than other traders would have made, if HFT is actually making markets more liquid.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#15

Post by Animats »

nosmokewhereiam wrote: post #4

There's an update at the bottom: - Delmarva Broadband is authorized 14.35-14.99 MHz at 186 kW. Contact is a law office in DC. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm - … and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm

Well, it shouldn't be hard at that power level to find the transmitter if you're anywhere nearby.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#16

Post by Animats »

uncledave wrote: post #10

Not sure I understand the point of using that band past amateur radio. Around 20m band is terrible for point to point communications. The antennas are huge, the bandwidth is low, the noise floor is really high and it’s prone to just about every annoying atmospheric condition possible.

If you use 186 kilowatts, you can punch through much of that.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#17

Post by client4 »

jaywalk wrote: post #7
intrepidhero wrote: post #5

Wouldn't a high frequency trader be building point to point links and thus benefit hugely from highly directional antennas? Seems like that would help with the interference quite a bit.

A point to point link from Chicago to NYC would require many hops along the way, which is what they have with microwave today. The whole point of experimenting with the 20 meter band is to eliminate those hops.

More like Chicago to Seattle.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#19

Post by twic »

uncledave wrote: post #10

Not sure I understand the point of using that band past amateur radio. Around 20m band is terrible for point to point communications. The antennas are huge, the bandwidth is low, the noise floor is really high and it’s prone to just about every annoying atmospheric condition possible.

Bandwidth doesn't need to be huge for HFT. If you can send a message saying "there was a big upward movement in the price of instrument X", that's enough to be incredibly valuable if it gets to the other end before anyone else knows about it. There might only be a few dozen instruments you're interested in, and a few events for each one, so being able to send a single byte could be enough.

Obviously, more bandwidth is useful, because you can send more details, and make better decisions at the receiving end. But most of the value is in getting a small message there fast.

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