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Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

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Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#181

Current fiber optic cables transmit signals at 2/3rds the speed of light. Modeling has shown that starlink's laser backbone would allow it to beat deep-sea cables in some situations. This article estimates a NYSE -> FTSE reduction from 76ms to 43ms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a HFT bidding war going on. https://archmeregreenarch.org/1456/news/starlink-and-the-ris... There is a newer version of fib…

Am I the only one who thinks HFT should be forbidden? Stocks and investments are a nice thing to have, since you can buy a share of a company you believe in, they get the money, do stuff, you get dividends and in the end can sell the stock after some time too. HFT changes these "beliefs in company" to "beliefs that the stock will go up", and the timeframe of those "beliefs" is sometimes in milliseconds. This turns cl…

Why should consenting individuals be forbidden from playing computer games with their own money?

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#182

Current fiber optic cables transmit signals at 2/3rds the speed of light. Modeling has shown that starlink's laser backbone would allow it to beat deep-sea cables in some situations. This article estimates a NYSE -> FTSE reduction from 76ms to 43ms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a HFT bidding war going on. https://archmeregreenarch.org/1456/news/starlink-and-the-ris... There is a newer version of fib…

Am I the only one who thinks HFT should be forbidden? Stocks and investments are a nice thing to have, since you can buy a share of a company you believe in, they get the money, do stuff, you get dividends and in the end can sell the stock after some time too. HFT changes these "beliefs in company" to "beliefs that the stock will go up", and the timeframe of those "beliefs" is sometimes in milliseconds. This turns cl…

[deleted]

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#183

Current fiber optic cables transmit signals at 2/3rds the speed of light. Modeling has shown that starlink's laser backbone would allow it to beat deep-sea cables in some situations. This article estimates a NYSE -> FTSE reduction from 76ms to 43ms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a HFT bidding war going on. https://archmeregreenarch.org/1456/news/starlink-and-the-ris... There is a newer version of fib…

Am I the only one who thinks HFT should be forbidden? Stocks and investments are a nice thing to have, since you can buy a share of a company you believe in, they get the money, do stuff, you get dividends and in the end can sell the stock after some time too. HFT changes these "beliefs in company" to "beliefs that the stock will go up", and the timeframe of those "beliefs" is sometimes in milliseconds. This turns cl…

Suppose I a (hypothetical) very low frequency value based trader buy a million dollars worth of Apple.

Apple should go up in price slightly, because someone (me) just made a big bet that it's going to do well. The market does this automatically.

TSMC should also go up in price very slightly, because Apple doing well makes it more likely that TSMC (a major vendor of theirs) will also do well, and the market just learned that Apple is slightly more likely to do well, so it also just learned that TSMC is more likely to do well. In other words the companies performance is correlated, so the stock prices should be as well.

By my understanding HFT is the mechanism by which the market can make TSMC go up slightly as well. High frequency traders can react to the information that apple is going to do better (as per it's increased stock price) and buy a bit of TSMC.

This seems like it should make the market more accurate, and if you buy that the market accurately assigning values to a company is a good thing, seems like a good thing.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#184

Current fiber optic cables transmit signals at 2/3rds the speed of light. Modeling has shown that starlink's laser backbone would allow it to beat deep-sea cables in some situations. This article estimates a NYSE -> FTSE reduction from 76ms to 43ms. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that there is a HFT bidding war going on. https://archmeregreenarch.org/1456/news/starlink-and-the-ris... There is a newer version of fib…

Am I the only one who thinks HFT should be forbidden? Stocks and investments are a nice thing to have, since you can buy a share of a company you believe in, they get the money, do stuff, you get dividends and in the end can sell the stock after some time too. HFT changes these "beliefs in company" to "beliefs that the stock will go up", and the timeframe of those "beliefs" is sometimes in milliseconds. This turns cl…

Rather than prohibiting maybe HFT should be separate org and shareholders would have option to reallocate their shares from one to the other.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#185

I like the ETH result and it is an impressive feat (I know some people involved in that work). That said the article is a lot of rubbish. First there is the weird focus on lasers, all (relevant) Optical Communication uses lasers, including fibre comms. Then they make it sound like this is to replace fibre, again rubbish. The amount of data going through fibres is absolutely staggering, replacing this with intersatell…

(really off-topic) The Z on ETHZ is important, ETH on its own is just (loosely) "university", the Z makes it the Zürich one ;D. There is exactly one other: EPFL in Lausanne. (And you can technically call them EPFZ and ETHL if you really want to confuse people.) (EPF [École Polytechnique Fédérale] is just the French version of German ETH [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule]. Funnily enough both have pretty good inte…

Half the reason I log onto HN is for the obscure random facts like these :) ty!

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the actual harm of HFT for the average person? I can set a $ limit on my orders, so I don't pay more than I want. Why should I care if some HFT guy scrapes 0.01% value off each trade?

It scrapes that % every trade, every millisecond, thousands of times over. That adds up, and all that money has to come from somewhere.

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Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#187
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy a stock, you must keep (hold) it for eg. 30 days (or 7, or 60, or whatever). Compute all you want, whenever you want, but instead of millisecond timings, optimize stuff for at least some time. Maybe even a tax on stock profits, which is really high and falls after some time of ownership of such stock (we have this in slovenia, but it's not really high in the first place, and time brackets go less than 5 ye…

Adding this sort of friction would increase spreads. Market makers are a net positive for markets (who buys/sells when no one else wants to?), and I don't see any downside to allowing them to manage risk and trade quickly. I think the way to increase fairness is to change the way orders are matched.

Another way would be to allow higher price granularity to allow more competition on price rather than speed.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#188
The mirror array sounds like a micro version of what's used in large Earth-based telescopes for the same purpose. Their primary mirrors are made out of movable segments to cancel out atmospheric effects. They're just a bit bigger...

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It scrapes that % every trade, every millisecond, thousands of times over. That adds up, and all that money has to come from somewhere.

That's the price you pay for liquidity, and the alternative (paying a difference in price far more than 0.01%) makes everyone worse off except other people competing in the markets. The money HFT's make comes from other people trading the zero sum short term trading game, not you (assuming you are longer term investor or non-participant in the market), so why should you or others in your situation get worked up about…

It’s weird to be how much some people hate market makers and traders who apply arbitrage strategies. I don’t think there would be as much hatred for HFTs if people understood what it is they do. They make markets on securities and arbitrage things. For example, creating units of SPY when it gets too far above NAV to bring the NAV back in line with the index. I’m sure there are more strategies I’m unaware of, but it’s not like Millionaire HFT man is picking the pockets of retail traders, there’s real money to be made elsewhere.

Re: Lasers enable satellite internet backbone, might remove need for deep-sea cables

#190
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since you can buy a share of a company you believe in I don't think this is generally true. Stock trading isn't charity, it's done to make a profit. Almost trading is done on the basis of second order effects, and has been for as long as there's been a stock market. Stocks aren't given value by the company being profitable, they're given value by what other people are willing to pay for them (okay, yes, dividends a…

Well sure it's for profit, but what exactly do we (the society) get if we allow millisecond investments in our companies? Compared to classic, long-term investments.

They fulfill different functions. Low trading delays make certain the difference between buying and selling price is low, and reduces differences in price between marketplaces. Both very good for people doing long term investments.
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