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Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

nanex.net

111–120 of 291 posts

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#111
post #90

The most likely explanation: no one got anything early. Venue timestamps can often disagree by a significant amount. It is very likely that SIAC (distributors of CQS and CTS) simply are not well synced to the reference clocked used to distribute the report. Nanex spends a lot of time doing analysis based on precision timing without providing any sort of error analysis as to how well timestamps produced from different…

There are clearly 2 spiking in trading, 400ms apart, skew between the CGS and EIA systems doesn't explain that.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#112

What is the benefit of trading over ms resolutions. What problem is it solving? Wouldn't trade be more efficient if it were lock stepped - say one trade per hour (per day?): you agree your trade and the exchange processes it on the hour. What would be lost that benefits the pseudo-capitalism of these systems by having such a regime. How would this negatively impact production.

It reduces the bid/ask spread if there are more bidders and askers all doing their thing all the time: http://www.tradersmagazine.com/news/hfts-spreads-credit-suis...

This part is actually a good thing. That said, I remain gobstopped that HFT is such a whipping boy in a world where no one responsible for the 2008 crash has been prosecuted or jailed.

The incident here seems to either be a clocking artifact or an excellent exploit of a momentary inefficiency in the market - just the sort of thing traders spend their careers on hunting down and exploiting - so why... so... serious???

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#113
post #111
post #90

The most likely explanation: no one got anything early. Venue timestamps can often disagree by a significant amount. It is very likely that SIAC (distributors of CQS and CTS) simply are not well synced to the reference clocked used to distribute the report. Nanex spends a lot of time doing analysis based on precision timing without providing any sort of error analysis as to how well timestamps produced from different…

There are clearly 2 spiking in trading, 400ms apart, skew between the CGS and EIA systems doesn't explain that.

It's just an algo designed to run before the release.. see my post below.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#114
post #95
post #90

The most likely explanation: no one got anything early. Venue timestamps can often disagree by a significant amount. It is very likely that SIAC (distributors of CQS and CTS) simply are not well synced to the reference clocked used to distribute the report. Nanex spends a lot of time doing analysis based on precision timing without providing any sort of error analysis as to how well timestamps produced from different…

I was once like you, young and innocent :)

Then you took an arrow to the knee?

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was futures, not stocks, but I see where you're going. Market makers aren't competing with buy-and-hold investors. Price fluctuations like this don't affect people that are investing in the fundamental performance of the underlying company. The price may swing by a few percent randomly in either direction, but in the long run, a growing company will have a growing stock price. Equities make up much of my portfol…

> As cynical as everyone is about how "big companies suck", they have historically done a pretty good job creating value. And I think that will continue for some time. // It's not like resources can run out or anything. You just dig up more.

But you can make processes more efficient and add more value with less human interaction. Consider Amazon vs. your local mom and pop grocery.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#116
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like the type of regulation that people outside of an industry put on the industry with good intentions but really no idea what the consequences would be. Consider a company who holds a press conference announcing something huge (either positive or negative). Anyone wanting to buy or sell in this tiny window pretty much gets shafted by such a system.

Yes, I am admittedly absolutely naive to the inner workings of the market. So what would happen in the press conference case? You would make your move based on the news knowing that sometime in the next 10 minutes it would be executed. No one else has any advantage so they can't necessarily get it done quicker. The value of short term moves is reduced, so everyone plays with a longer view.

There is one huge problem with this, which is that under no circumstances can you reward people for placing larger orders than they can actually execute. If you do, you encourage people to make large orders in the hope that only part of them will execute, which can have catastrophic consequences if for some reason the whole trade executes in some unexpected case.

Any form of lottery is vulnerable to this. If you clamp all the timestamps to ten minute intervals, then you need some arbitrary rule to decide which of the valid trades in some time window to execute. If you randomly choose a few, you encourage people to put in more orders than they can execute. If you satisfy them partially, you encourage people to put in larger orders than they can execute.

As a result, the only way to do this that encourages proper behavior is to have some arbitrary competitive rule in place. The easiest and most obvious such arbitrary rule is the fastest order wins. This might seem anti-competitive at first glance, because it keeps out the tiny investors who can't get enough capital to compete in this area. But really, it's not that bad because it only takes a few million dollars if that to get top-notch hardware in a Manhattan or Chicago datacenter. In addition, market-making is by-and-large a commodity service: the entire HFT community can only make money when the market is inefficient, and market-maker competition makes the market more efficient. The HFT world makes money off of market inefficiencies, which are capped by the size of the market and the amount of outside investment. It's a hyper-competitive world of arbitrary rules, in place to encourage a more efficient market for investors. So you don't want to do it yourself, and you don't want to regulate them because you want HFT to be a insane low-margin nightmare for the benefit of everyone else.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#117

Sorry if this is a question with an obvious answer, but how is the report delivered/obtained?

By parsing this JSON file http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/wngsr.json

Do they hammer the webserver for this? Is the JSON pushed somehwere? I'm in Europe, so numbers are probably too high, but httping results for the file suggest this is not how it's done:

    % httping http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/wngsr.json
    PING ir.eia.gov:80 (http://ir.eia.gov/ngs/wngsr.json):
    connected to 205.254.135.25:80 (286 bytes), seq=0 time=459.92 ms 
    connected to 205.254.135.25:80 (286 bytes), seq=1 time=230.15 ms 
    connected to 205.254.135.25:80 (286 bytes), seq=2 time=232.81 ms 
    connected to 205.254.135.25:80 (286 bytes), seq=3 time=235.23 ms 
I would love to have some background information about how this trading works. Are there any technical details available how this works?
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