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Re: Is it better to watch an HD news channel in the event of an imminent nuclear atta
On a slightly related note, a couple of milliseconds can make a difference (and a lot of money).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...-millions.html
Quote:
Lewis, whose previous books include Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, gets inside the world of high-frequency traders (HFTs) who install ultra-fast fibre-optic data connections between their systems and modern stock exchanges, giving them a minuscule speed advantage over rival traders. This advantage, while just milliseconds (thousandths of a second), allows HFTs to see other buyers’ orders before they are executed.
At the most basic level, they use this time advantage to buy the stock before the first deal has been processed and sell it on to the original purchaser at a slightly higher price, a process known as “front-running”...
...What was previously thought of as fast - before 2007 - just wouldn’t cut it for HFTs. What was fast then was the fastest a human could go. Now there was no man in the loop.
“The response of many of them suggested that their entire commercial existence depended on being faster than the rest of the stock market,” writes Lewis revealing that some of them “would sell their grandmothers for a microsecond [a millionth of a second]”.
No wonder that Spread Networks, the company building the fibre-optic connection, proudly boasted: “Round-trip travel time from Chicago to New Jersey has been cut to 13 milliseconds.”
And HFTs were willing to pay through the nose to use it, with the first 200 to sign up forking out $2.8bn between them.
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