3 ms·
The advantage is being first. If you learn in Tokyo that a stock is going to go up, you can buy all of the available stock in New York, or cancel your order to
by dmurray 8y ago
The advantage is being first. If you learn in Tokyo that a stock is going to go up, you can buy all of the available stock in New York, or cancel your order to sell it. It's going to take you 50 ms to get that information to New York, but if your competitor takes 49 ms, you lose money; if he takes 51 ms, you make money. So 1 ms is important, and so is any time difference big enough to outweigh the noise in the exchange's ordering of events. I know people measuring and caring about speed gains of single-digit nanoseconds, roughly equivalent to replacing your two-metre cables with one-metre cables.
The end customer (whoever actually wants to buy stocks) doesn't need the price to update every millisecond. But no one has yet figured out a better way to run an electronic exchange than "first come, first served".
Source: also worked in HFT for a long time.