Australian Company Promises Switching Hardware With Sub-130ns Latency 77
snowdon writes "The race for low-latency in finance and HPC has taken a major turn. A bunch of engineers from Australia have 'thrown away the air conditioning' in a traditional switch, to get a 10G fibre-to-fibre latency of less than 130ns! Way faster than more traditional offerings. This lady (video) would tell you that it's equivalent to just 26m of optical fibre. Does that mean we just lose money faster?"
HFT Should be illegal (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not good news; it promotes a trend in a technological approach to making money in the stock market that should be flat out illegal.
Re:HFT Should be illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not good news; it promotes a trend in a technological approach to making money in the stock market that should be flat out illegal.
Why? I know what it is, how it works, how it makes money, and I'm not overly concerned. So they make a market, and they make it really fast. Eh.
All I ever hear as a rationalization for dislike of it is "workers of the world unite" and "1% OWS" and "something bad happened to the markets, I don't like witches, so lets hang the witch because she has property I like that we can take from her" and "I hate the rich" and all that sort of stuff. I never hear a good moral or ethical explanation of why doing what you normally do, but really fast, is so wrong.
Another good question, is assuming you "make it illegal" how in the world would you enforce that? What would the reg look like? Like... your connection to the market must be this far away blah blah even if it means making a 1000 KM coil of fiber on the data center floor, or maybe all traders must connect to "the market" over geosync satellite links so the average latency is both long and more or less equal?
Please don't confuse conventional HFT with "Flash trading" which is basically window dressed up insider trading, corrupt as all heck. If you do insider trading and trade your own book etc thats just illegal, but if you do it really fast people like to pretend its just "flash trading" and not wrong.
The easiest way to "get rid of" HFT is to fix decimalization. Back when we traded on eights thats too wide to make money on a HFT strategy, and if we allowed millionth of a penny trading quotes that would narrow bid/ask resulting in too little money generated by HFT. Decimalization seems to be almost the perfect pricing system to result in massive HFT strategies, so if you really hate HFT (and WHY?) then just fix the pricing structure so its not profitable anymore. Rather than playing games with legal enforcement of favored or disfavored behavior, simply make disfavored behavior unprofitable. I suppose the opposite solution of going big would work just as well, fine we'll only trade stocks on dollar values now no fractions of a dollar.