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One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than under
by dharmab 7y ago
One of Starlink's planned markets is global high frequency trading. The latency of radio and laser transmission in atmosphere and space is much lower than undersea fiber optic cables. (Light moves significantly slower through glass than through air.) Even with the longer distance and retransmission they stand a good chance of being lower latency across oceans than undersea cables.
- godelski 7y agoI did the math on this. It probably wouldn't be good for hft. The highly profitable hft is done on the floor of the nyse. There's some from Boston but they typically use directed radio instead of fiber-optic. Satellites will be even slower, but maybe cheaper if you're sending date from California or Australia. But it's still probably cheaper (and more profitable) to put a machine on the floor or even just in NYC. I'm not sure why hft would be a major pitch. These people fight for floor space at the nyse because that much latency matters.
- etaty 7y agoThink London to NYC, or NYC to Tokyo. Fiber will be slower. https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196 https://youtu.be/QEIUdMiColU?t=196
- godelski 7y agoWhat I'm saying is that it's faster to just buy a server in NYC.
- eloff 7y agoThe idea is you profit on acting on cross market trading before anytime else can. It's not about latency to any single market.
- godelski 7y agoSeeing something before someone else can IS latency. That's why servers on the NYSE floor (or ANY SE floor) are really expensive. Because it gives you an advantage. It isn't humans reacting and buying in HFT, it is computers. The humans are constantly updating algorithms, but HFT means it is the computers doing the reactions (based on algos written).
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoThey have servers in both locations. If you see that a stock starts falling in London you have a time window where you can still sell it at a higher price in say New York, until the price drops to the same level thus closing the opportunity for arbitrage.
- Consultant32452 7y agoHow quickly can you "see" the price falling in London and get that message to NYC? Whoever "sees" it first wins, right? That's what they're talking about.
- mruts 7y agoI don't think you understand what many HFT firms do. They arbitrage between exchanges. For example the option or futures price of a security in Chicago and price of the underlying in New York. Also arbitraging between equities listed on multiple exchanges. Co-location isn't a solution to these problems, and low latency lines between exchanges in different parts of the country and world is a huge huge factor to successfully implementing many/most HFT strategies.
- lukev 7y agoGP is obviously not talking about HFT on the NYT, but HF arbitrage between different global exchanges.
- godelski 7y agos/nyse/arbitrary exchange/g
- eloff 7y agoIt seems useful, but tricky to monetize. But if you gave priority to hft traffic then you could charge more as it would still have a small advantage over a standard StarLink plan.
- fastball 7y agoHow would that be hard to monetize? You literally just charge people for internet access. * HFT firms will pay for it if the latency is lower * Online gamers that play with other people around the globe would also probably be willing to pay to get their ping down. * Maybe they could have a LEO CDN. * People like me who travel a lot would be willing to pay for it. It would be especially sweet if I could somehow ditch my phone plan and just have global satellite coverage and use VOIP via Google Voice or something.
- eloff 7y agoBecause HFT firms can pay for a standard StarLink and get the same results. There are few HFT customers and you have to offer them something that can't get from your consumer service if you want them to pay commensurate to the value provided. Your other points have nothing to do with my HFT specific comment.
- wmf 7y agoIt's very likely that standard Starlink plans will downlink traffic as close to the customer as possible to reduce lateral utilization, but HFT needs to route traffic on the constellation all the way across the Atlantic.
- eloff 7y agoIt will have to be something like this that gives best possible latency for a higher price.
- fastball 7y ago"standard StarLink"? StarLink doesn't exist yet, and when it does, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that two satellite constellation providers could serve the HFT market and both be profitable.
- blhack 7y agoThis is not true as far as I can tell. HFT does not appear to be part of spacex’s strategy at all.
- portyllo 7y agoSpecially now that the satellites have no crosslinks.
- paragraft 7y agoMy understanding was that was just a limitation on the first batch, as they're still developing the design, but they're intending to cross link in future. Is that not the case?
- shaklee3 7y agoSure, but that's significant feature. Other satellites will be built and launched by the time they get there, and they absolutely need to OSL for capacity.
- gpm 7y agoI originally though this would be a good market, and have voiced that opinion on HN, but afaik SpaceX has never said anything about it. Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere. This, unlike fiber, should be faster than SpaceX's constellation making that business unlikely to work out. (Possibly unless high bandwidth almost as low latency is useful).
- Inthenameofmine 7y ago> Someone has since pointed out to me that HFT is currently done by bouncing microwaves off the atmosphere. I would love to read up on this. Is this similar to HARP?
- dharmab 7y agoBouncing waves off the ionosphere has different ranges depending on the time of day. Do you have more info on how that's currently used? I'm curious to learn more.
- gpm 7y agoNot really, sorry