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Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

blog.abctaylor.com

31–40 of 184 posts

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#31
post #26
post #9

... is there some movement toward "upload the strategy and let the exchange run it"? which would provide a more level playing field, reduce energy and hardware costs, etc?

You mean enabling arbitrary code execution from a third party when you can lose billions of people's money in half a second? Also if two people want to make the same trade, who gets it? Exchanges do provide very limited special conditional execution instructions such as peg orders or stop orders, but it seems like a hard problem for them to support anything more sophisticated and general.

I agree with your sentiment but I would clarify that historically some exchanges did indeed create custom order types for larger clients that were not always public knowledge. I think that has mostly been eliminated but there are still a range of unique order types you can utilize depending on the exchange.

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#34

If a big exchange goes to the cloud it won’t look like a regular company setting up an aws account and getting a bunch of ec2 instances in us-east-1. They would at least have dedicated racks. I suspect the provider would end up with a plan where traders can get servers that all have the same network distance from the exchange’s nics (down to the same length of fiber).

Honestly for something this niche I wonder if AWS would make a new region, like gov-cloud or secret. The goal would be to use tech that can accommodate ULL deployments.

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#35

Low latency trading should be forbidden. The exchanges should add random amounts of latency to every trade.

Why? Historically spreads have been much wider, I for one appreciate how close they trade now. Instead of a guy on the floor taking dollars from you, you have a bot taking pennies.

Even large funds like Vanguard have said that the current system has reduced costs in net.

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#36
post #35

Low latency trading should be forbidden. The exchanges should add random amounts of latency to every trade.

Why? Historically spreads have been much wider, I for one appreciate how close they trade now. Instead of a guy on the floor taking dollars from you, you have a bot taking pennies. Even large funds like Vanguard have said that the current system has reduced costs in net.

> Instead of a guy on the floor taking dollars from you, you have a bot taking pennies.

^ excellent way to put it

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#37
post #7

I'm a total trading noob. Can you explain why a low latency is worth so much? And how these traders "exploit" that advantage to make a profit?

This is extremely simplifying the nuance, but imagine there are two traders who want to buy what a single trader is willing to sell at a given price? Well, the first one to get to the exchange and "lift the offer" will get the price, while the second trader will have to pay a higher price.

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#38
post #7

I'm a total trading noob. Can you explain why a low latency is worth so much? And how these traders "exploit" that advantage to make a profit?

High-frequency trading is essentially a low-margin, high-volume play that exploits small price differences for profit. The most obvious example would be arbitraging the same security on different exchanges (buying low on one and selling pennies higher on another). Similarly, algorithmic models could exploit price volatility for individual securities on the same exchange. Under such conditions, fractions of a second can determine whether a given trade is a winning or losing one.

Re: Thoughts on low latency trading if exchanges went full cloud

#40
post #10

Nice article. Wondering though why trading is not done in discrete batches, e.g. 5 second intervals? Trades in the same interval get filled equally or stochastically? Info about trades with that same 5 second batch delay? Is there some (theoretical) market efficiency thing at play? All this HFT feels wasteful and bad for 'regular' human investors.

If you think about it you can never eliminate the advantage of being faster. If you do 5 seconds batches it just means the edges of the batches become the time-sensitive points. If you want to kill HFT you can do it directly via very very small transaction fees. But guess how popular that is...

You can certainly alleviate the disadvantage of being slower though - and that’s exactly what literature in batch trading argues.
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