Re:A Gazillion-Dollar Standoff over Two High-Frequency Tradi...
by dmurray on Sunday March 10, 2019 @07:39PM
(#19355487)
I've seen this paper before, or something like it. It's incredible to me that anyone would publish this. It's like reading a paper on astrology or dowsing, written in the style of a physics paper.
You don't get any benefit from putting your trading system half way between the two exchanges, you colocate it with one or the other (or both). Likewise if there are three exchanges to trade on, you don't build a datacentre at the circumcentre of the triangle or whatever voodoo geometry nonsense. You colocate at each of the three and buy/rent/build a line for each of the three point-to-point connections. Source: worked in HFT for more than 15 minutes.
Re:A Gazillion-Dollar Standoff over Two High-Frequency Tradi...
by loxias on Monday March 11, 2019 @02:09AM
(#19357027)
I also know one of the authors quite well, long term friend. He is nothing short of brilliant but also has a penchant for enjoying being a "subtle troll". While he does have a serious point/observation/discovery in the paper, I assure you, he's well aware of the "funny" or "goofy" aspect of the impracticability and laughing about it has been a source of great late night entertainment between us.
Re:A Gazillion-Dollar Standoff over Two High-Frequency Tradi...
by mattrp on Monday March 11, 2019 @12:50AM
(#19356766)
I know the author well and he would likely conced to you some of the practical points you’re making about collocation and market microstructure. However he wrote the paper to illustrate how global compute networks could someday collaborate using the techniques described to facilitate AI. Hft is a early form of AI so if that’s an area of interest for you maybe take another look at that paper.
There's a similar article at When The Speed Of Light Is Too Slow: Trading at the Edge ( http://www.kurzweilai.net/when-the-speed-of-light-is-too-slo... )
The paper that both of these articles are based on: Relativistic statistical arbitrage https://www.alexwg.org/publications/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf which opens with:
> Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have brought typical trading latencies below 500 µs, at which point light propagation delays due to geographically separated information sources become relevant for trading strategies and coordination e.g., it takes 67 ms, over 100 times longer, for light to travel between antipodal points along the Earth’s surface. Moreover, as trading times continue to decrease in coming years e.g., latencies in the microseconds are already being targeted by traders, this feature will become even more pronounced.