As obvious as the idea seems in hindsight, no one on the sell-side has a product like this right now. The closest thing is the Thor router, which is a crude attempt to accomplish the same feat because it doesn't address variation in latency. An algorithmic execution product like this would effectively end latency arbitrage, which is a source of RenTech's livelihood. To hedge against that, they have secured the IP rights to the technology.
On the other hand, this is a clear case of using the patent system to secure and persist an inefficiency in the market. It's hard to measure the cost of such an inefficiency to institutional investors (mutual funds, pensions, endowments, etc) but I suspect that it is well into the billions annually.
Say you send out $100mil orders broken down into 100 $1mil orders, they are going to take some time to execute completely.
Won't the HFT's detect them long before they are executed completely ?
What's described in the doc seems to be an algo for snapping up everything that's available across the various markets at one instant in time (rarely that much).
If you try to grab $100M when there isn't that much around, you'll have to wait until someone puts in more orders so you can trade with them. Any market maker (including human ones) will not let you trade again at the same price if someone's just taken out the whole market, so your next tranche will be executed at a worse price.
Dripping the orders into the market is very common, but of course you leak the information by doing it. For the HFT however it isn't as obvious as seeing that an order must trigger an order on another venue (NBBO requirements) and just rushing to pull your orders from there or trading ahead of that order.
The point of this system is to send N orders to N exchanges in a simultaneous enough way that an HFT trader can't spot an order executing on exchange A and then issue their own order against exchange B.
the answer is 'we have loads of PhD math geniuses building the strategies and amazing execution technology'
that the institutional DD team is saying this to the investment committee or there is actually another entirely different reason?
So they'll come in with a list of checkboxes, which as a fund manager you learn to tick. Even if the questions have no bearing on how you're actually making money. So you might get asked what qualifications people have (very few people actually have a qualification in building strategies), or you'll get asked something quite superficial about what technology you're using (what's it written in? C or C#? Those are the same, right? That's good...)
Unfortunately, most of the DD teams I've seen do not ask the questions they need to ask. They have a long list of irrelevant questions that make sense to people who are in the CYA (cover your ass) business, not investing or coding. I never met anyone who asked me whether we used version control, and only a small sample bothered to ask whether we had our own money in the fund (one smart guy avoided a 50% blowup by doing this and discovering the big boss had barely any skin in the fund).
It'd be an interesting short white paper/post to see what a technical take on DD would be in a fund of funds/institutional investing scenario. I guess that would take away some of the value of the rise in the "consultants" we're getting calls from every day.
This is marketing spiel.
If you just want to trade on a bunch of exchanges so no information flows between them, you can easily (TM) write a program that either a) lines up the orders at each exchange to execute at a specific time or b) delays the orders from a central server by the line delay.
So say NYC is 13ms from Chicago. You want to hit both at once. As long as you're not 13 ms late, nobody can see your order in one place and react at the other. You don't need an atomic clock for that, NTP will do just fine.
They're doing this because they have a reputation as a technologically advanced firm, and they know it will impress institutional investors, most of whom are still living in a time warp where spreadsheets are an advanced means of getting an edge over the market. They meet these guys, who are basically from another dimension of investing, and they suddenly need an explanation to their bosses of why RT can generate the most impressive returns of any strategy ever. The answer is "we have loads of PhD math geniuses building the strategies and amazing execution technology".