4 ms·

Tangentially related, but I wonder how long before HFT harnesses neutrino transmission to send market data directly through the earth? The MINOS [1] project is

Tangentially related, but I wonder how long before HFT harnesses neutrino transmission to send market data directly through the earth? The MINOS [1] project is underway to send neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois to detectors in northern Minnesota. Straight through the earth's crust. Detecting neutrinos is hard, and modulating data on them will probably be even more difficult, but if it shaves a few micro/milliseconds off trading time, I'm sure someone will make it happen eventually. HFT have already added dedicated undersea fiber-optic links [can't find source, NYC->LDN is obvious, I think there was talk or they began one from CHI/NYC->TOK but might be wrong, it involved the melting icecaps to easily sink the fiber cable], shortwave radio broadcasts [3], and microwave links [4]. I think HFT is frivolous, personally, but if it helps networking I think it would be cool to someday talk "on neutrinos" through the center of the earth! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS [3] https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-trading-part-i-the-west-chicago-tower-mystery/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr... [4] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...

4ntonius8lock 7y ago
Very interesting. Physical wars brought pointless spending that prompted innovation. I wonder if the mini-financial wars being waged will result in some cool tech coming out of all the craziness. I had never though of this when thinking about the rent seeking nature of many parts of the financial industry.
- rmah 7y ago
  Already has. The first notable example that springs to mind is "message queues" which were pioneered for use in finance. Companies like TIBCO grew fat on such software and now they are commonplace.
smallnamespace 7y ago
So some quick Googling shows that the neutrino beam fires every 1.3 seconds[1] and the 'near' detector on average captures 20 neutrinos, the 'far' detector sees <1 detection [2]. Note that the latter paper is from 2005 so this may have been substantially upgraded. Each 'spill' takes 8.67 milliseconds, so if you simply vary the firing time to send a signal using coordinated clocks, naively you could send up to ln(1000 / 8.67) = 6.8 bits per second, but at the cost of the very latency that you're trying to minimize. I'm sure there are smarter schemes, like also varying the neutrino beam density, but at 20 neutrinos per detection there's not much channel capacity in the amplitude either. It looks like the main bottleneck is in the neutrino generation though, you can use more accelerator beams without needing to build more detectors right away. Note also that the 'far' detector is only 500 miles away, so depending on how collimated the neutrino beam is you may be losing a lot of signal to get all the way through the Earth. [1] http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html [2] http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf
- JudgeWapner 7y ago
  They got this far with public funding, that's enough for proof of concept. Let the billion-dollar budgets of institutional/prop trading desks see what they can do with this technology.
rolltiide 7y ago
That doesn't seem like it would be actually faster or closer for NYC to HK/Shanghai, close but not a latency improvement at the speed of light? Well I guess if a direct line can be made itll shave off some milliseconds Maybe less infrastructure required.

4ntonius8lock 7y ago

Very interesting. Physical wars brought pointless spending that prompted innovation. I wonder if the mini-financial wars being waged will result in some cool tech coming out of all the craziness. I had never though of this when thinking about the rent seeking nature of many parts of the financial industry.

rmah 7y ago
Already has. The first notable example that springs to mind is "message queues" which were pioneered for use in finance. Companies like TIBCO grew fat on such software and now they are commonplace.

smallnamespace 7y ago

So some quick Googling shows that the neutrino beam fires every 1.3 seconds[1] and the 'near' detector on average captures 20 neutrinos, the 'far' detector sees <1 detection [2]. Note that the latter paper is from 2005 so this may have been substantially upgraded. Each 'spill' takes 8.67 milliseconds, so if you simply vary the firing time to send a signal using coordinated clocks, naively you could send up to ln(1000 / 8.67) = 6.8 bits per second, but at the cost of the very latency that you're trying to minimize. I'm sure there are smarter schemes, like also varying the neutrino beam density, but at 20 neutrinos per detection there's not much channel capacity in the amplitude either. It looks like the main bottleneck is in the neutrino generation though, you can use more accelerator beams without needing to build more detectors right away. Note also that the 'far' detector is only 500 miles away, so depending on how collimated the neutrino beam is you may be losing a lot of signal to get all the way through the Earth. [1] http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html [2] http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf

JudgeWapner 7y ago
They got this far with public funding, that's enough for proof of concept. Let the billion-dollar budgets of institutional/prop trading desks see what they can do with this technology.

rolltiide 7y ago

That doesn't seem like it would be actually faster or closer for NYC to HK/Shanghai, close but not a latency improvement at the speed of light? Well I guess if a direct line can be made itll shave off some milliseconds Maybe less infrastructure required.