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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?

#51

Post by bigredhdl »

allenrb wrote: post #34
ajkjk wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.

I’ve spent some time working in electronic trading, and I agree with you. Not only is the compensation very comfortable, but it’s the most interesting work I’ve ever done. That’s a tough combination to resist. As a result, it attracts people who should be out there curing cancer, developing new technologies, researching fundamental sciences, and so forth. It’s something everyone around me has acknowledged at one poin…

I like that term "“bug” in capitalism". I have always felt the "bug" is basically incorrectly pricing externalities. We don't properly charge you for the carbon you put into the atmosphere or the mental health strain you put on workers and so on. If societal costs were also real costs the allocation of resources could be more optimized.

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

#52

Post by morei »

bigredhdl wrote: post #47
andromeduck wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.

Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.

That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art?

After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable.

If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.

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

#53

Post by jcims »

twic wrote: post #19
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 i…

Yeah this is just a narrow wormhole ~8ms into the future. You can pack all sorts of state around it via their existing low-latency fiber...probably just need a few bits over RF to do work.

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

#54

Post by raviolo »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #38

Chicago to London one way is around 35ms over fibre but that could be down to 21ms over the air like this. That signal is only about 10-15khz wide[1] from that diagram. That’s not a whole lot of data transfer ability, measured in the low kbps range rather than mbps. Very low kbps when you add in error correction. We are moving out of / have left the solar minimum so the MUF is usually well above the 20 metre band eac…

One does not need a lot of bandwidth to trade successfully. In fact, a limited number of signals agreed upon ahead of time is enough. E.g. signal “A” could mean “buy 10 contracts”, signal “B” - “sell 100 contracts”, etc. And you can of course wrap 256 such signals into one byte. So transmitting a single byte at an opportune time let’s you control your trading on the other continent in a quite precise fashion. If you make such transmission, say, 10 times per day your bandwidth utilization is technically 10 bytes per day or about 0.001 bps - yet you can make a ton of money.

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

#55

Post by bigiain »

ohazi wrote: post #33
cozzyd wrote: post #20

Hope we don't see VHF or UHF traders soon.

There aren't a lot of advantages to VHF/UHF over the direct microwave links that they're already using (and a handful of disadvantages), so it's probably not likely. The big perceived advantage to HF is eliminating all of the hops, despite the dramatically reduced bandwidth. With VHF/UHF, you'd still need the hops, but you also have reduced bandwidth. If you need to hop, might as well make use of the bandwidth that y…

I believe you missed the joke here...

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

#56

Post by TheNorthman »

morei wrote: post #52
bigredhdl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.

That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between chocolate & HFT. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

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

#57

Post by jdc »

morei wrote: post #52
bigredhdl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.

That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

    — Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

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

#58

Post by PoachedSausage »

walrus01 wrote: post #18

For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3 locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo.

I'm curious as to UK end of the link now. I would guess somewhere on the hills around London to get line of sight for a microwave link down to the city.

Having just checked the Ofcom Spectrum Information System [0], it does not appear that they could have a transmitter for the opposite direction due to the frequency allocation to MoD and Amateur. Maybe they have a contract with the shortwave broadcasters to embed trading data into their broadcasts.

[0] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/spectrum/information/spectrum-infor...

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

#59

Post by cma »

andromeduck wrote: post #30
ajkjk wrote: post #26

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.

Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.

Saving one microsecond is rewarded the same as saving one millisecond, as long as you beat out the next best guy. There are vast diminishing returns to society but the winner is still rewarded the same so incentivized to make it faster and faster, ultimately burning away energy and misallocating capital until the reward is exhausted, and then repeating each time a new generation of hardware is out.

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

#60

Post by walrus01 »

ardy42 wrote: post #44
walrus01 wrote: post #18

For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3 locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo.

> For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3 locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo. Got any pictures?

https://hackaday.com/2018/05/12/hft-on-hf-you-cant-beat-it-f...

With more traditional microwave for the last hop.

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