24 ms·
Humidity in New Jersey impeding radio transmissions and slowing stock trades
- Faaak 8y agoMaybe that's a good incentive to take into account environmental externalities ? /s
- sambull 8y agoAnd as our atmosphere is warmed by us we will have increased humidity. The stock market is the least of our worries
- remote_phone 8y agoNo, that’s not how it works. That’s a 1 dimensional view. We will have more wild variations of weather, so some places will get much, much more humid and others will get much much drier. And maybe the same place will get wetter and drier in the same season. It will be disastrous, but in a wilder and more unpredictable way.
- sambull 8y agoI agree with you, weather is different during different seasons and other factors. No matter what the global average temperature is increasing, with that is the certainty that areas affected will have increased capacity for moisture in the air. As of 2017, this is the majority of the globe, will have greater capacity for increase humidity from previous years. I've provided data showing the anomaly over time is warmer for that majority of our planet. [0] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/
- Applejinx 8y agoAbsolutely correct. What's happening is the increase of total energy in a titanic, global chaotic system. By definition, and even in a purely mathematical model, you'll get more intense 'outlier' events in both range and statistical behavior. In real life, exactly the same thing happens and is happening.
- 1over137 8y agoOh no! Not slower stock trades! Meanwhile, in nearby Quebec, at least 15 people are dead from this heatwave.
- melling 8y agoThe intense human desire to be snarky? You can understand why the story might be interesting to business or technology people? I never knew humidity affected radio transmission speeds.
- sethammons 8y agoA buddy of mine used to work on radio internet stuffs. He said water does all kinds of strange things to the signal and it's path. Transmitting over large bodies of water and in full sports stadiums can be problematic
- digi_owl 8y agoIt depends on the frequency, higher frequencies gets affected more by water and like. Best one i have heard of was a wet dog acting as a very good wifi signal blocker.
- heavenlyblue 8y agoI mean, if you really wanted to know about it - then you could have read a book about radio; wouldn't you?
- melling 8y agoPersonally, I appreciate when science, math, history, etc. is added to the daily news. It’s an enjoyable way to learn, and it provides everyone an opportunity to learn
- 0xfeba 8y agoOne person in the car in NYC.
- Uberphallus 8y agoOne of my favourite articles on radio and HFT: https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-backyard-ii/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/hft-in-my-ba...
- digi_owl 8y agoReminds me of how compact motors and wireless telegraphs were combined so that small, fast, motorboats could meet cargo vessels outside New York and telegraph back their cargo to some trader on Wall Street...
- dingaling 8y agoLater, DHL was formed to fly bills of lading by commercial flights from the West coast ports to Hawaii ahead of the ships arriving. So by the time they arrived the cargo could be offloaded without delay.
- dredmorbius 8y agoSource? Hrm, here: http://wap.dhl.com/info/history.html http://wap.dhl.com/info/history.html
- gothroach 8y agoInteresting read - I had not realized that DHL had started in the US, let alone in San Francisco. Not having dealt with them directly much, I had thought they were a European company. Not that it's the same company after being bought out.
- dredmorbius 8y agoMy previous misunderstanding was that the'd originated with / grown from Deutsch Bundespost. That's a subsequent relationship. Sugar shipment bills of lading. Whodathunkit?
- 8y ago
- patrickg_zill 8y agoIt is not really affecting stock trading, but it is affecting HFT trading, where many thousands of bids are made each second. What I mean is that if you wanted to actually buy or sell stocks you would not notice the difference.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- OscarCunningham 8y agoIs this what they mean by "liquidity crisis"?
- madengr 8y agoMeh, they need to use gravity waves; not affected by dielectric constant. Maybe a spinning mass that is frequency modulated. I just need to patent that and be funded by some wealthy traders. Seriously though, I’m surprised they are not using direct path, deeply buried air-line coax. Has to be TEM propogation or else group delay is too high, so rectangular waveguide won’t work. Circular may work; I need to brush up on my EM.
- lb1lf 8y agoToo late (patenting that gravity idea, that is) - John D. Kraus suggested precisely that in an appendix to his magnificent book on all things antennas, aptly named 'Antennas'. I do believe he concluded it was not the most practical of communication schemes, though. :) (Edit - corrected name of author; I had originally called the poor guy Erwin Klaus)
- 52-6F-62 8y agoI could find nothing on Erwin Klaus or his book Antennas. Can you point a guy in a direction?
- lb1lf 8y agoMy apologies; a double typo -KRAUS. (Courtesy of my SwiftKey keyboard app), first name John. (Erwin Kraus is an acquaintance of mine; no idea how that short circuit occurred.) John D. Kraus - Antennas.
- madengr 8y agoBig Ear is a good book; essentially his autobiography.
- 52-6F-62 8y agoMany thanks! edit: Holy, this book is beyond me— but that's exactly what I wanted. For other curious parties, it's on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/Antennas2ndbyjohnD.Kraus1988 https://archive.org/details/Antennas2ndbyjohnD.Kraus1988
- OldHand2018 8y agoMarkets stay synchronized via continuous arbitrage. US equity trading centers in New York while options trading centers in Chicago. Slowing the data transmission to the Cboe data center in New Jersey slows its transmission to Chicago, and thus provides increased opportunity for HFT traders to earn money. If you value fairness, this is a bad thing.
- mlevental 8y ago>HFT traders to earn money. If you value fairness, this is a bad thing. fairness for whom? hfts compete with other hfts not retail investors.
- KMag 8y agoThose with short-term information are the ones who benefit most by increases in the time taken to disseminate information. Let's say some fund's AI parses and interprets a favorable article 25 ms before anyone else. They start simultaneously buying stocks in NYC while writing puts and buying calls in Chicago. Moisture in NJ slows down news from Chicago to NYC by 2 ms. Automatic market making algorithms in NYC, in the absence of evidence from the options markets, bet on mean reversion and don't adjust their bids and asks as quickly as they would had information arrived from Chicago. In those 2 ms, two investors each sell 100 shares a penny cheaper than they would have otherwise to the institutional investor with the news-reading AI. A retired teacher and traditional hedge fund manager are each $1 poorer and someone writing a newsreading bot is $2 richer than they would have been had NJ been drier. The individual stories are pretty boring, but millions of times a day, a small short-term information edge is slightly more valuable. Sure, 99% of the time both the winners and the losers are institutional investors. However, if you just look at a retail investor (or some institutional investor representing mostly retail investors), they're almost never on the side with a short-term informational advantage. On the one hand, it's 99% just institutions winning and institutions losing. But, when you zoom in on those 1% of cases where an unwitting retail investor got lucky or got unlucky, there's a bias in their luck due to their lack of valuable short-term information. On the other hand, those 2 ms might also mean that if a big retirement fund is unloading $10 million in stock to a bank, that bank has an extra 2 ms to simultaneously start selling the stock and get short in the options market before the low-latency market makers adjust prices. Maybe this means the bank is willing to bid $2 higher for the retirement fund's block trade. In any case, the actions of the HFTs have both positive and negative knock-on effects for ordinary retail investors, even if other HFTs account for the vast majority of the HFTs' profit margins. Sometimes the short-term information comes from the outside world, and sometimes it comes from institutional investors trying not to telegraph their moves on behalf of retail investors.
- analog31 8y agoSounds like a perfect opportunity to sell index futures. Refractive index, that is. ;-)
- kuwze 8y agoOh the humidity!
- thinkcontext 8y agoI thought the fastest hft systems used optics. That seems much more likely to be effected by humidity than short range radio.
- virtuallynathan 8y agoThe radio route between NYC and ORD is quite a bit faster than the fastest fiber path, its about 8.5ms vs 13.1ms. They have much better as-the-crow-flies paths, and the transmission latency is lower.
- cyberpunk0 8y agoCry me a river. How will greedy stock traders extract money from the world at breakneck pace now?
- stillworks 8y agoNot sure what the article is even trying to say. The typical HFT firm will have it's computers colocated inside the exchange and will be working the order books of instruments listed on that specific exchange. There are some "complicated" smoke and mirror setups for eg where execution reports of the HFT are "captured" by some "big broker" on the street and HFT's trades are booked by the big broker, but again, the big broker's computer is also in this case colocated in the venue. What is exactly slowing down HFT ? What is the overlap of instruments between these venues ?
- qeternity 8y agoUnfortunately there are over 50 ATS in the US, and although most people think the “stock market” is in New York, it’s really in Chicago (eminis run the world these days). Trading spooz against single names as HFT do often use microwave antenna transmission.
- baybal2 8y agoThis is, I believe, a setup specifically for inter-exchange arbitrage, front-running
- hueving 8y agoInter-exchange arbitrage is not front-running because they are using public information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_running
- paulie_a 8y ago> colocated inside and exchange That is why I think all trades should be arbitrarily delayed by a random number of milliseconds.
- stillworks 8y agoThat would be fundamentally wrong. At least in the case of cash equity, as soon as a buyer matches a seller, the price of the instrument should be updated in real time. Same applies to inserting orders in the order book, there should be zero delay, so that the exchange can halt to auction as soon as it detects out of the norm bids (or asks).
- nicetryguy 8y agoNJ here. Feels like Florida the last few days. Ugh
- matt_the_bass 8y agoI’d love to learn about the physics of “why" this happens. Anyone have a good reference?
- blattimwind 8y agoHFT links use microwave frequencies. Water absorbs microwave radiation quite well (cf. microwave oven); as the water content (humidity) of air increases, so does microwave absorption. Conversely, signal power delivered to the receiver drops, and SNR decreases, making reception more difficult. Water should intuitively have a lower velocity factor, too, so waves might actually propagate more slowly in high humidity air compared to dry air.
- matt_the_bass 8y agoThanks! So the underlayi g issue is less SNR so higher error rate and lower throughout. Is that correct?
- ppurka 8y ago32°C is considered a "heat wave?"