16 ms·

Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

252 points by lmh 6y ago

bigmattystyles 6y ago
Do exchanges like HF traders? I know HF traders themselves justify their own existence by claiming they provide liquidity to the markets, but I've always just sort-of rolled my eyes at that. They only extract value and provide none, in my opinion, tax the profits heavily. I think every exchange should pad each order by a random number between 0 and 250ms, it would take care of it. The company profiled in this video add lag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4
- cryptofistMonk 6y ago
  I'm sure the exchanges like the buckets of money that HFTs pay them, even on their discounted commission fees. There's also billions in industry just around supporting HFTs, including FPGAs, silicon fab, networking equipment, etc. The cost to society of killing HFTs would probably be fairly large and imo the drawbacks are mostly minor.
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    All of the money HFTs make would have been made by other investors, presumably for reasons more related to predicting or responding to actual changes in market conditions. HFTs are parasites that basically leech value from those trades by executing them faster than you can, and forcing you to buy at a higher/sell at a lower price. I think the platonic ideal of a marketplace involves making money by determining the actual value of goods, not stealing information from others and jumping the line. They also contribute to a lot of market instability, see for instance the flash crash[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
    - hervature 6y ago
      I don't like these type of comments because they show little understanding of how the market works. Explain the process in which the HFT firms "leech value" from your trades or "[steal] information and [jump] the line"? Your trade arrives at the exchange. Then, the HFT firms learn about your trade. They then price correct many instruments and derivatives that are all inter-related. Now, if we are talking about quote stuffing or intentionally trying to DDoS exchanges, everyone agrees this is bad behavior and is regulated against. Finally, as you mention, these type of algorithms contributed to market instability of the flash crash but it was also initiated by large (slow) directional bets. You propose taking the oxygen out of the room of a fire but one can also propose removing matches that started the fire.
      - matthewdgreen 6y ago
        If prices are out of line, that definitely seems like a place where automated trading would be valuable. But HFTs' tech advantage isn't just about finding a better arbitrage algorithm or being smarter: it's also quite clearly about exploiting a pure technical advantage over other traders. The fact that HFTs are so willing to invest in speed even to achieve a tiny advantage over other HFTs kind of gives the game away. And when people quite rightly observe that having a speed advantage over other traders obviously allows extractive behavior like frontrunning, a bunch of people on HN come out with irate counter-takes that claim HFT are an unalloyed good -- never something nuanced like, "yes HFT could allow for some extractive behavior, but it's counterbalanced by these advantages which I will explain in detail." (And the corollary, which is an explanation of "why a world where all traders have the same speed advantages wouldn't have all the claimed advantages of HFT but be even more efficient.") I guess it's also worth pointing out that these responses are usually from people who are involved in the HFT industry in some way, and usually they start out by accusing people of "not understanding the industry". Which is precisely the accusation many make against HFT: that it's so deliberately opaque that people outside the industry can't possibly determine how much extraction there is compared to value being added. Saying "trust us" or "you couldn't possibly know because you aren't on the inside profiting from it" is not the compelling argument you think it is.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  HFT does enhance liquidity and price discovery. The advantage to being "first" to trade is only there when multiple bidders are issuing orders at the exact same price point, and this is easily addressed by reducing minimum tick size so that price choices will just naturally disperse (as opposed to all being quantized at the same value).
- bob1029 6y ago
  Certainly exchanges love all paying customers. The liquidity argument is a good one IMO. If you did not have participants willing to arbitrage fractions of a cent per share, it could be really difficult to get the ends to meet on a daily basis for things that arent traded with as much volume as monsters like TSLA/AMD/et. al. The use of microwave links is just a natural consequence of competition within the HFT space. It might be reasonable to apply a minimum latency bound across the board as some participants have already, but I argue this would inhibit much of the innovation that got us to this point to start with. Being able to quickly clear a trade on thinly-traded securities is a wonderful thing for all involved. Capital not locked up in limit orders is more useful to humanity (in most cases).
- lumost 6y ago
  My understanding is that HFTs function in a complete race to the bottom, with the only profitable activity being to trade faster and with slightly faster information than the next HFT. There is no secret sauce to keep them from eating each other as the costs to create a new HFT are not all that high vs. the profit opportunity of shaving a few percent off the commissions of the dominant trading system. Faster links and faster trades between exchanges mean they carry less risk when carrying out arbitrage (while also lowering the amount of arbitrage available). The fact they made crazy profits initially is more of an artifact that they were competing against humans rather than other automated systems. In a few years we may see them reach the point of diminishing returns where all exchanges share a common pool of liquidity that adapts in a few millis to new information.
- toast0 6y ago
  Exchanges generally like (and provide incentives to) orders that add liquidity, which means orders that do not execute immediately. HFT orders are generally intended to not execute immediately, so exchanges would tend to like them. Of course, HFT also usually pays higher connection fees to get closer to the exchange, which probably doesn't hurt their relations with the exchange. The dark pools that HFT firms setup to trade with retail investors are probably less enjoyed by the exchanges, but at the same time, it does reduce load at the exchange, so maybe it's mixed because it reduces the exchanges' income from commissions, but also reduces their expense from operations. Padding orders by a random amount doesn't really discourage racing to get their first; if it's a uniform random, across all orders, you still want to get there first, which means you still want to get your order there quickly; and depending on implementation, you might break your order up into many smaller orders, so that some of them get there with less delay. If you wanted to disincentivize speed, what you really want to do is group orders that arrive in a given interval and treat them as arriving at the same time; you could do that with fixed intervals (1 minute, 1 second, 100 ms, whatever) or adaptive intervals based on the number of orders over the last interval, or randomly, if you like random. From what I've seen from selling employer stock over the years, the commissions have gone down (to zero), and the bid/offer spreads have gone down, and both are due to HFT firms, so as far as I can see, HFT is helping me. I can't say I've noticed a difference in execution speed, trading always seemed pretty fast, as long as I was able to setup the order via the browser.
  - maest 6y ago
    I agree with most of your post, but I don't think you can safely attribute broker commissions going to 0 to HFTs.
    - toast0 6y ago
      Payment for order flow comes from dark pools, run mostly by HFT. Payment for order flow incentives brokers to get more trades, and reduced commissions gets more trades. I don't know that other brokers would have gone all the way down to $0 without Robinhood pushing them, but they were already down to $5-$10.
- maest 6y ago
  Both yes and no. For most exchanges: HF traders are big data consumers and they _have_ to have all the orderbook daa, so they're big customers of exchanges. They also pay for stuff like colocation. Many exchanges also provide rebates for liquidty providing orders, which HF traders are incentivised to use. One notable exception is the Investors Exchange (IEX), are vocally anti-HF.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  Could we not simply “batch” every trade within a second (or some nominal time value) to be concurrently executed? I like your idea though.
nosmokewhereiam 6y ago
There's an update at the bottom: - Delmarva Broadband is authorized 14.35-14.99 MHz at 186 kW. Contact is a law office in DC. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm - … and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm
- Animats 6y ago
  Well, it shouldn't be hard at that power level to find the transmitter if you're anywhere nearby.
- topspin 6y ago
  Kilowatts? wtf So much for that hobby. Where were those links supposed to go anyhow?
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Maybe there's a hobby in receiving their trading data and having software react to it — following milliseconds behind their trade.
    - csommers 6y ago
      They’re already 5 moves ahead by the time it hits market.
    - fractionalhare 6y ago
      Milliseconds are an eternity.
    - ukd1 6y ago
      ...it will be encrypted
      - snypher 6y ago
        How much time does encryption take? I'd wager the fastest links are close to plaintext.
intrepidhero 6y ago
Wouldn't a high frequency trader be building point to point links and thus benefit hugely from highly directional antennas? Seems like that would help with the interference quite a bit.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  At that power any spill would still be a very strong signal. Directional antennas are like gun silencers. They cause the signal to be many times weaker and it seems a lot until you figure out that the receiver works on a log scale and whatever is left is still registered as a strong signal.
- jaywalk 6y ago
  A point to point link from Chicago to NYC would require many hops along the way, which is what they have with microwave today. The whole point of experimenting with the 20 meter band is to eliminate those hops.
  - client4 6y ago
    More like Chicago to Seattle.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
The inexact coordinates in the image lead to the front yard of some farm. Now I can't stop thinking of Kash Hill's Maxmind story ref: https://www.google.com/maps/place/41°36'00.0"N+88°36'00.0"W/ https://www.google.com/maps/place/41°36'00.0"N+88°36'00.0"W/ ref: https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052 https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...
- topspin 6y ago
  Good HF antennas are large. Wouldn't at all be surprised to find them on some farm a few miles out of town.
- widforss 6y ago
  https://goo.gl/maps/aWdYVhVLbBfuSKvq9 https://goo.gl/maps/aWdYVhVLbBfuSKvq9
uncledave 6y ago
Not sure I understand the point of using that band past amateur radio. Around 20m band is terrible for point to point communications. The antennas are huge, the bandwidth is low, the noise floor is really high and it’s prone to just about every annoying atmospheric condition possible.
- Animats 6y ago
  If you use 186 kilowatts, you can punch through much of that.
- twic 6y ago
  Bandwidth doesn't need to be huge for HFT. If you can send a message saying "there was a big upward movement in the price of instrument X", that's enough to be incredibly valuable if it gets to the other end before anyone else knows about it. There might only be a few dozen instruments you're interested in, and a few events for each one, so being able to send a single byte could be enough. Obviously, more bandwidth is useful, because you can send more details, and make better decisions at the receiving end. But most of the value is in getting a small message there fast.
  - jcims 6y ago
    Yeah this is just a narrow wormhole ~8ms into the future. You can pack all sorts of state around it via their existing low-latency fiber...probably just need a few bits over RF to do work.
    - erik_seaberg 6y ago
      I’m reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#Extremely_low_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#... where there’s just enough of a channel through the ocean to send a few symbols that mean something prearranged like “make contact ASAP.”
walrus01 6y ago
For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3 locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo.
- cl0ckt0wer 6y ago
  What altitude would you have to be at to have line of site to Tokyo and London from Chicago? They're probably aimed somewhere above and in between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    You'd need to be in orbit. Edit: actually it might not be possible at all from a single point anywhere in the universe.
    - filmfact 6y ago
      I just stared at a globe, and it’s possible, but not from a geostationary orbit. Think about a hemisphere projected onto a 2d circle - you can see all points on the surface of the hemisphere on the projection. Logically it must be possible to select a hemisphere, such that any two random points on a sphere lie on that hemisphere, and would thus be visible in the projection. The only edge cases is two points that are diametrically opposite - i.e north and south pole, which would only both be visible at infinite distance. Points nearly diametrically opposed would only be visible from extreme distance. This doesn’t take into account inconvenient mountains, but they can easily be moved.
      - caymanjim 6y ago
        In this case I was considering three points, but yeah, they're all in the northern hemisphere, so your scenario applies.
      - zaarn 6y ago
cozzyd 6y ago
Hope we don't see VHF or UHF traders soon.
- ohazi 6y ago
  There aren't a lot of advantages to VHF/UHF over the direct microwave links that they're already using (and a handful of disadvantages), so it's probably not likely. The big perceived advantage to HF is eliminating all of the hops, despite the dramatically reduced bandwidth. With VHF/UHF, you'd still need the hops, but you also have reduced bandwidth. If you need to hop, might as well make use of the bandwidth that you can get with microwave.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    I believe you missed the joke here...
    - ohazi 6y ago
      facepalm I did miss the joke. An upvote to both of you.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  "What is name of the shortwave band in the RF spectrum? High Frequency, HF, right? So, what should we use it for? Of course, High Frequency Trading over High Frequency!"
ridaj 6y ago
Why suspect HFTs over other potential interfering applications? Could be anything, and unless I missed something, TFA doesn't show any evidence that the usage is HFT-motivated
- advisedwang 6y ago
  The Chicago mercantile exchange is close to the center of the transmission. There are previous instances of HFT chasing low latency between Chicago and NYC, so it seems plausible this is something similar. It is not proof of course. Plenty of other things could be happening in Chicago.
  - analog31 6y ago
    I wonder if high frequency sports betting is a thing.
ajkjk 6y ago
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.
  - mrob 6y ago
    People aren't complaining about arbitrage, they're complaining about microsecond-level timing optimizations. The same benefits to smaller players could be obtained from trading at a human time scale (e.g. something around professional StarCraft player actions per minute).
  - bigredhdl 6y ago
    Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.
    - morei 6y ago
      That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.
      - TheNorthman 6y ago
        the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between chocolate & HFT. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
nomercy400 6y ago
Can you listen to the traffic/data on these lines? Is it encrypted (seems unlikely if latency is a must)? Can you mitm?
- davidwihl 6y ago
  Ham radio transmissions are not allowed to be encrypted per FAR 97.113(4). [1] I suspect this is also a violation of FAR 97.113(3) "Communications in which the station licensee or control operator has a pecuniary interest, including communications on behalf of an employer" [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=d4b3c60d2d60000a147f885bdee88264&mc=true&node=pt47.5.97&rgn=div5#se47.5.97_1113 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=d4b3c60d2d60000a14...
  - bigiain 6y ago
    Do the “part 5 experimental licenses” have that ham encryption restriction? It sounds like that at the very least are exempt from the ham station ID requirements. Are they actually ham operators, or other licensed entities permitted to use the ham bands?
    - hatsunearu 6y ago
      Part 5 is not bound by ham radio rules, you can transmit anything according to certain rules, and if you use the Part 5 rules, you don't care about the rest of the rulebook.
CraigJPerry 6y ago
Chicago to London one way is around 35ms over fibre but that could be down to 21ms over the air like this. That signal is only about 10-15khz wide[1] from that diagram. That’s not a whole lot of data transfer ability, measured in the low kbps range rather than mbps. Very low kbps when you add in error correction. We are moving out of / have left the solar minimum so the MUF is usually well above the 20 metre band each day now so going forward, it might be a good capability to have while it lasts for the next 8 years or so. [1] I don’t know what scale division the ticks at the top represent but the SSB signals to the left would be up to around 3khz wide.
- raviolo 6y ago
  One does not need a lot of bandwidth to trade successfully. In fact, a limited number of signals agreed upon ahead of time is enough. E.g. signal “A” could mean “buy 10 contracts”, signal “B” - “sell 100 contracts”, etc. And you can of course wrap 256 such signals into one byte. So transmitting a single byte at an opportune time let’s you control your trading on the other continent in a quite precise fashion. If you make such transmission, say, 10 times per day your bandwidth utilization is technically 10 bytes per day or about 0.001 bps - yet you can make a ton of money.
  - jandrese 6y ago
    All you really need to do is to beat the trade you just saw enter the system so you can buy the trade out from under them and mark it up while their bits are still stuck in glass. You know, "provide liquidity".
    - kasey_junk 6y ago
      That’s not at all how it works.
      - jandrese 6y ago
        If not why do they need to have the lowest latency? Seems to me that if you want to provide liquidity what you need to do is buy a wide range of stocks and sit on them so they're all listed and available for trade. But you don't need extremely low latency for that. If you're providing liquidity you should be sitting on an insanely diverse portfolio at the end of every day. The whole point is to make sure trades are available so nobody is waiting for something to appear on the market.
StanislavPetrov 6y ago
>What this means is that some entities are experimenting with the use of the HF bands for the most direct, point-to-point means of conveying this information possible. Interesting that this is now being done with HF bands. For several years, however, this has already been done through the use of lasers (although at a far greater cost). >Last year (2013), Anova completed a laser network link between the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges, and now, it seems the company is nearing completion on a similar laser network between the NYSE and NASDAQ data centers in Mahwah and Carteret, New Jersey. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network-between-nyse-and-nasdaq-will-allow-high-frequency-traders-to-make-even-more-money https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network...
dchichkov 6y ago
Just curious. Does anyone know, what is a 35.295 Mhz used for in the Bay Area (Sunnyvale)?
raviolo 6y ago
Could be these guys - they are publicly advertising Chicago to Europe data link via HF radio (for traders, of course): https://www.raft-tech.com/ https://www.raft-tech.com/
- zymhan 6y ago
  Indeed, the Bloomberg article they link to shows a photo of antenna towers in Aurora, Illinois near the Chicago Mercantile Exchange datacenter https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/companies-pitch-shortwave-radio-to-shave-milliseconds-off-trades https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/companies...
mikewarot 6y ago
Morality and outrage aside, we know where they are, and the format they are using, and they are in a fixed site. The real question is: How can we: 1> receive and regenerate the source bit stream 2> use that to exactly recreate the transmitted signal 3> synchronized with that signal, and 4> then use it to cancel out the interference?
- meetups323 6y ago
  "Hello FTC I'd like a license to intentionally destructively interfere with a separate, licensed, broadcast -- which form should I fill out?"
  - asudosandwich 6y ago
    That depends, are you a hobbyist or lobbyist?
- analog31 6y ago
  Jamming is illegal.
- mikewarot 6y ago
  To clarify... I'm not proposing to jam the signal, just cancel it out (in the receive channel) so we can listen without the annoyance. With SDR gear, it should be possible to null out most, if not all of the signal, once the modulation format is known.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"It was during this activity that I noticed this massive signal at the top of the 20 meter band, occasionally firing up and clobbering ongoing conversations by U.S. amateurs."
zsellera 6y ago
That waterfall doesn't look like any sensible digital modulation to me, or at least if I were doing HFT, the spectrogram would look totally different. I think the source is rather an unintentional radiator in this case.
astrea 6y ago
This reminds me of the first ever "hack" that used semaphores (not the ones you're thinking of): https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/03/the-worlds-first-cyber-attack-happened.html?m=1 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/03/the-worlds-first-cyber...
- sireat 6y ago
  Hacking the semaphores is also plot device in "Count of Monte Cristo" causing the financial ruin of a villain. I wonder if Dumas was inspired by Blanc brothers.
fortran77 6y ago
I have no real opinion on HFT, but I think its outrageous the FCC allows people to interfere with other services like this. Let them use point-to-point microwave relays or fiber cables
audiometry 6y ago
His leap to a conclusion, "this is HFT in Chicago" seems overly precise. Sure, it is a great hypothesis, but not much supplementary evidence.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  The context here is that there are already speculations and some indirect evidence about High-Frequency Traders on the High Frequency band for years (e.g. see [0] from 2018), which made it a naturally candidate. I'm not saying that it's proved, but a candidate worth investigating. [0] Shortwave Trading | Part I | The West Chicago Tower Mystery 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... [1] SHORTWAVE TRADING | PART II | FAQ AND OTHER CHICAGO AREA SITES https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-trading-part-ii-faq-and-other-chicago-area-sites/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-tr... [2] Shortwave Trading | Part III | Fourth Chicago Site, East Coast, Patent, Regulation, and Farmer Kevin Mystery https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/shortwave-trading-part-iii-fourth-chicago-site-east-coast-patent-regulation-and-farmer-kevin-mystery/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/shortwave-tr...
8bitsrule 6y ago
ARRL mentioned this stuff in June 2018, then crickets. The second link on ka7oei's page, a 2018 discussion among hams, names a few of the perps' ID's. It said 'WJ2XGD' was the only one licensed on 20m.[0] Quote: 'Emission bandwidth shall not extend beyond the bandlimits' = 14-14.99. They're -not- required to ID themselves [Section 5.115] (an eyebrow-raiser).[1] [0] https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=204018&x= https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=204018&x=. [License to M-Wave Networks LLC, Illinois] [1] https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/ham-radio-mentioned-prominently-in-high-frequency-trading-story.617581/ https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/ham-radio-mentioned... This long, archived page about HFT tech briefly considers the HF option considerations (search for 'HAM radio') [2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20171012010437/https://meanderful.blogspot.in/2017/05/lines-radios-and-cables-oh-my.html https://web.archive.org/web/20171012010437/https://meanderfu...]
vgrigorescu 6y ago
Think I found them. Using the update from the bottom of the page: > … and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. I found this petition from M-Wave Networks, LLC for permission to build 4 towers in Kane County, Illinois: https://www.countyofkane.org/FDER/Zoning%20Petitions%20Documents/Petition%204564.pdf https://www.countyofkane.org/FDER/Zoning%20Petitions%20Docum... The location in the petition is approx. 41.82907908782928, -88.4940281199101, which is about 16 miles (27 km) from the center coordinate of the TDOA map (41.60, -88.60). Not bad given the caveat of "the above location is likely accurate to only a few 10s of km at best." The e-mail address in the petition has the domain tower-research.com, which is a high-frequency trading firm. The only thing I'm confused about is that the zoning petition was discussed at the meeting on Dec 8th 2020. If it was approved, it seems remarkably fast to build a tower given that the article was from Dec 15th.
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  > If it was approved, it seems remarkably fast to build a tower given that the article was from Dec 15th. It makes sense they moved quickly, since there's a limited time period where they'd have this advantage over other firms which set up similar systems.
souprock 6y ago
Someday the traders will be beaming neutrinos through the Earth.
- kreelman 6y ago
  ...Maybe one day they'll have quantum entangled particles and they'll be able to do spooky things at a distance and communicate instantly? I don't pretend to understand the physics, but sounds like it would be interesting... if it could work. Perhaps then Radio Amateurs would become Amateur Tanglers?
  - welterde 6y ago
    While it is spooky interaction at a distance it can't be used to transfer information faster than light. In simple terms, the states are correlated, but you have no way to influence what they are. You get a random number and know instantly what the other random number of the remote particle is, but that doesn't transfer any information from you to the remote location or vice-versa. The most obvious explanation would have been that there is some kind of hidden state and they don't interact at all anymore, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
- retzkek 6y ago
  Fermilab is very close to the CME data center and is focused on neutrino research now, maybe a good opportunity for a partnership for some extra funding...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
OpticalWindows 6y ago
Neat. thanks for the article lmh
rlt 6y ago
There was speculation Starlink could be used for HFT once it gets laser links, but this would even beat that since you don't need to travel up and down an extra 500 miles, plus any buffering in the satellites. Starlink would have more bandwidth, but you probably don't need much for HFT.

252 points by lmh 6y ago

Do exchanges like HF traders? I know HF traders themselves justify their own existence by claiming they provide liquidity to the markets, but I've always just sort-of rolled my eyes at that. They only extract value and provide none, in my opinion, tax the profits heavily. I think every exchange should pad each order by a random number between 0 and 250ms, it would take care of it. The company profiled in this video add lag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4

cryptofistMonk 6y ago
I'm sure the exchanges like the buckets of money that HFTs pay them, even on their discounted commission fees. There's also billions in industry just around supporting HFTs, including FPGAs, silicon fab, networking equipment, etc. The cost to society of killing HFTs would probably be fairly large and imo the drawbacks are mostly minor.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  All of the money HFTs make would have been made by other investors, presumably for reasons more related to predicting or responding to actual changes in market conditions. HFTs are parasites that basically leech value from those trades by executing them faster than you can, and forcing you to buy at a higher/sell at a lower price. I think the platonic ideal of a marketplace involves making money by determining the actual value of goods, not stealing information from others and jumping the line. They also contribute to a lot of market instability, see for instance the flash crash[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
  - hervature 6y ago
    I don't like these type of comments because they show little understanding of how the market works. Explain the process in which the HFT firms "leech value" from your trades or "[steal] information and [jump] the line"? Your trade arrives at the exchange. Then, the HFT firms learn about your trade. They then price correct many instruments and derivatives that are all inter-related. Now, if we are talking about quote stuffing or intentionally trying to DDoS exchanges, everyone agrees this is bad behavior and is regulated against. Finally, as you mention, these type of algorithms contributed to market instability of the flash crash but it was also initiated by large (slow) directional bets. You propose taking the oxygen out of the room of a fire but one can also propose removing matches that started the fire.
    - matthewdgreen 6y ago
      If prices are out of line, that definitely seems like a place where automated trading would be valuable. But HFTs' tech advantage isn't just about finding a better arbitrage algorithm or being smarter: it's also quite clearly about exploiting a pure technical advantage over other traders. The fact that HFTs are so willing to invest in speed even to achieve a tiny advantage over other HFTs kind of gives the game away. And when people quite rightly observe that having a speed advantage over other traders obviously allows extractive behavior like frontrunning, a bunch of people on HN come out with irate counter-takes that claim HFT are an unalloyed good -- never something nuanced like, "yes HFT could allow for some extractive behavior, but it's counterbalanced by these advantages which I will explain in detail." (And the corollary, which is an explanation of "why a world where all traders have the same speed advantages wouldn't have all the claimed advantages of HFT but be even more efficient.") I guess it's also worth pointing out that these responses are usually from people who are involved in the HFT industry in some way, and usually they start out by accusing people of "not understanding the industry". Which is precisely the accusation many make against HFT: that it's so deliberately opaque that people outside the industry can't possibly determine how much extraction there is compared to value being added. Saying "trust us" or "you couldn't possibly know because you aren't on the inside profiting from it" is not the compelling argument you think it is.
zozbot234 6y ago
HFT does enhance liquidity and price discovery. The advantage to being "first" to trade is only there when multiple bidders are issuing orders at the exact same price point, and this is easily addressed by reducing minimum tick size so that price choices will just naturally disperse (as opposed to all being quantized at the same value).
bob1029 6y ago
Certainly exchanges love all paying customers. The liquidity argument is a good one IMO. If you did not have participants willing to arbitrage fractions of a cent per share, it could be really difficult to get the ends to meet on a daily basis for things that arent traded with as much volume as monsters like TSLA/AMD/et. al. The use of microwave links is just a natural consequence of competition within the HFT space. It might be reasonable to apply a minimum latency bound across the board as some participants have already, but I argue this would inhibit much of the innovation that got us to this point to start with. Being able to quickly clear a trade on thinly-traded securities is a wonderful thing for all involved. Capital not locked up in limit orders is more useful to humanity (in most cases).
lumost 6y ago
My understanding is that HFTs function in a complete race to the bottom, with the only profitable activity being to trade faster and with slightly faster information than the next HFT. There is no secret sauce to keep them from eating each other as the costs to create a new HFT are not all that high vs. the profit opportunity of shaving a few percent off the commissions of the dominant trading system. Faster links and faster trades between exchanges mean they carry less risk when carrying out arbitrage (while also lowering the amount of arbitrage available). The fact they made crazy profits initially is more of an artifact that they were competing against humans rather than other automated systems. In a few years we may see them reach the point of diminishing returns where all exchanges share a common pool of liquidity that adapts in a few millis to new information.
toast0 6y ago
Exchanges generally like (and provide incentives to) orders that add liquidity, which means orders that do not execute immediately. HFT orders are generally intended to not execute immediately, so exchanges would tend to like them. Of course, HFT also usually pays higher connection fees to get closer to the exchange, which probably doesn't hurt their relations with the exchange. The dark pools that HFT firms setup to trade with retail investors are probably less enjoyed by the exchanges, but at the same time, it does reduce load at the exchange, so maybe it's mixed because it reduces the exchanges' income from commissions, but also reduces their expense from operations. Padding orders by a random amount doesn't really discourage racing to get their first; if it's a uniform random, across all orders, you still want to get there first, which means you still want to get your order there quickly; and depending on implementation, you might break your order up into many smaller orders, so that some of them get there with less delay. If you wanted to disincentivize speed, what you really want to do is group orders that arrive in a given interval and treat them as arriving at the same time; you could do that with fixed intervals (1 minute, 1 second, 100 ms, whatever) or adaptive intervals based on the number of orders over the last interval, or randomly, if you like random. From what I've seen from selling employer stock over the years, the commissions have gone down (to zero), and the bid/offer spreads have gone down, and both are due to HFT firms, so as far as I can see, HFT is helping me. I can't say I've noticed a difference in execution speed, trading always seemed pretty fast, as long as I was able to setup the order via the browser.
- maest 6y ago
  I agree with most of your post, but I don't think you can safely attribute broker commissions going to 0 to HFTs.
  - toast0 6y ago
    Payment for order flow comes from dark pools, run mostly by HFT. Payment for order flow incentives brokers to get more trades, and reduced commissions gets more trades. I don't know that other brokers would have gone all the way down to $0 without Robinhood pushing them, but they were already down to $5-$10.
maest 6y ago
Both yes and no. For most exchanges: HF traders are big data consumers and they _have_ to have all the orderbook daa, so they're big customers of exchanges. They also pay for stuff like colocation. Many exchanges also provide rebates for liquidty providing orders, which HF traders are incentivised to use. One notable exception is the Investors Exchange (IEX), are vocally anti-HF.
jimbob45 6y ago
Could we not simply “batch” every trade within a second (or some nominal time value) to be concurrently executed? I like your idea though.

nosmokewhereiam 6y ago

There's an update at the bottom: - Delmarva Broadband is authorized 14.35-14.99 MHz at 186 kW. Contact is a law office in DC. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm - … and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. See https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm

Animats 6y ago
Well, it shouldn't be hard at that power level to find the transmitter if you're anywhere nearby.
topspin 6y ago
Kilowatts? wtf So much for that hobby. Where were those links supposed to go anyhow?
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Maybe there's a hobby in receiving their trading data and having software react to it — following milliseconds behind their trade.
  - csommers 6y ago
    They’re already 5 moves ahead by the time it hits market.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    Milliseconds are an eternity.
  - ukd1 6y ago
    ...it will be encrypted
    - snypher 6y ago
      How much time does encryption take? I'd wager the fastest links are close to plaintext.

intrepidhero 6y ago

Wouldn't a high frequency trader be building point to point links and thus benefit hugely from highly directional antennas? Seems like that would help with the interference quite a bit.

lmilcin 6y ago
At that power any spill would still be a very strong signal. Directional antennas are like gun silencers. They cause the signal to be many times weaker and it seems a lot until you figure out that the receiver works on a log scale and whatever is left is still registered as a strong signal.
jaywalk 6y ago
A point to point link from Chicago to NYC would require many hops along the way, which is what they have with microwave today. The whole point of experimenting with the 20 meter band is to eliminate those hops.
- client4 6y ago
  More like Chicago to Seattle.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

WarOnPrivacy 6y ago

The inexact coordinates in the image lead to the front yard of some farm. Now I can't stop thinking of Kash Hill's Maxmind story ref: https://www.google.com/maps/place/41°36'00.0"N+88°36'00.0"W/ https://www.google.com/maps/place/41°36'00.0"N+88°36'00.0"W/ ref: https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-a-random-kansas-f-1793856052 https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-turn...

topspin 6y ago
Good HF antennas are large. Wouldn't at all be surprised to find them on some farm a few miles out of town.
widforss 6y ago
https://goo.gl/maps/aWdYVhVLbBfuSKvq9 https://goo.gl/maps/aWdYVhVLbBfuSKvq9

uncledave 6y ago

Not sure I understand the point of using that band past amateur radio. Around 20m band is terrible for point to point communications. The antennas are huge, the bandwidth is low, the noise floor is really high and it’s prone to just about every annoying atmospheric condition possible.

Animats 6y ago
If you use 186 kilowatts, you can punch through much of that.
twic 6y ago
Bandwidth doesn't need to be huge for HFT. If you can send a message saying "there was a big upward movement in the price of instrument X", that's enough to be incredibly valuable if it gets to the other end before anyone else knows about it. There might only be a few dozen instruments you're interested in, and a few events for each one, so being able to send a single byte could be enough. Obviously, more bandwidth is useful, because you can send more details, and make better decisions at the receiving end. But most of the value is in getting a small message there fast.
- jcims 6y ago
  Yeah this is just a narrow wormhole ~8ms into the future. You can pack all sorts of state around it via their existing low-latency fiber...probably just need a few bits over RF to do work.
  - erik_seaberg 6y ago
    I’m reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#Extremely_low_frequency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication_with_submarines#... where there’s just enough of a channel through the ocean to send a few symbols that mean something prearranged like “make contact ASAP.”

walrus01 6y ago

For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3 locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo.

cl0ckt0wer 6y ago
What altitude would you have to be at to have line of site to Tokyo and London from Chicago? They're probably aimed somewhere above and in between https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave
- caymanjim 6y ago
  You'd need to be in orbit. Edit: actually it might not be possible at all from a single point anywhere in the universe.
  - filmfact 6y ago
    I just stared at a globe, and it’s possible, but not from a geostationary orbit. Think about a hemisphere projected onto a 2d circle - you can see all points on the surface of the hemisphere on the projection. Logically it must be possible to select a hemisphere, such that any two random points on a sphere lie on that hemisphere, and would thus be visible in the projection. The only edge cases is two points that are diametrically opposite - i.e north and south pole, which would only both be visible at infinite distance. Points nearly diametrically opposed would only be visible from extreme distance. This doesn’t take into account inconvenient mountains, but they can easily be moved.
    - caymanjim 6y ago
      In this case I was considering three points, but yeah, they're all in the northern hemisphere, so your scenario applies.
    - zaarn 6y ago

cozzyd 6y ago

Hope we don't see VHF or UHF traders soon.

ohazi 6y ago
There aren't a lot of advantages to VHF/UHF over the direct microwave links that they're already using (and a handful of disadvantages), so it's probably not likely. The big perceived advantage to HF is eliminating all of the hops, despite the dramatically reduced bandwidth. With VHF/UHF, you'd still need the hops, but you also have reduced bandwidth. If you need to hop, might as well make use of the bandwidth that you can get with microwave.
- bigiain 6y ago
  I believe you missed the joke here...
  - ohazi 6y ago
    facepalm I did miss the joke. An upvote to both of you.
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
"What is name of the shortwave band in the RF spectrum? High Frequency, HF, right? So, what should we use it for? Of course, High Frequency Trading over High Frequency!"

ridaj 6y ago

Why suspect HFTs over other potential interfering applications? Could be anything, and unless I missed something, TFA doesn't show any evidence that the usage is HFT-motivated

advisedwang 6y ago
The Chicago mercantile exchange is close to the center of the transmission. There are previous instances of HFT chasing low latency between Chicago and NYC, so it seems plausible this is something similar. It is not proof of course. Plenty of other things could be happening in Chicago.
- analog31 6y ago
  I wonder if high frequency sports betting is a thing.

ajkjk 6y ago

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.

andromeduck 6y ago
Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.
- mrob 6y ago
  People aren't complaining about arbitrage, they're complaining about microsecond-level timing optimizations. The same benefits to smaller players could be obtained from trading at a human time scale (e.g. something around professional StarCraft player actions per minute).
- bigredhdl 6y ago
  Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.
  - morei 6y ago
    That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.
    - TheNorthman 6y ago
      the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between chocolate & HFT. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

nomercy400 6y ago

Can you listen to the traffic/data on these lines? Is it encrypted (seems unlikely if latency is a must)? Can you mitm?

davidwihl 6y ago
Ham radio transmissions are not allowed to be encrypted per FAR 97.113(4). [1] I suspect this is also a violation of FAR 97.113(3) "Communications in which the station licensee or control operator has a pecuniary interest, including communications on behalf of an employer" [1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=d4b3c60d2d60000a147f885bdee88264&mc=true&node=pt47.5.97&rgn=div5#se47.5.97_1113 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=d4b3c60d2d60000a14...
- bigiain 6y ago
  Do the “part 5 experimental licenses” have that ham encryption restriction? It sounds like that at the very least are exempt from the ham station ID requirements. Are they actually ham operators, or other licensed entities permitted to use the ham bands?
  - hatsunearu 6y ago
    Part 5 is not bound by ham radio rules, you can transmit anything according to certain rules, and if you use the Part 5 rules, you don't care about the rest of the rulebook.

CraigJPerry 6y ago

Chicago to London one way is around 35ms over fibre but that could be down to 21ms over the air like this. That signal is only about 10-15khz wide[1] from that diagram. That’s not a whole lot of data transfer ability, measured in the low kbps range rather than mbps. Very low kbps when you add in error correction. We are moving out of / have left the solar minimum so the MUF is usually well above the 20 metre band each day now so going forward, it might be a good capability to have while it lasts for the next 8 years or so. [1] I don’t know what scale division the ticks at the top represent but the SSB signals to the left would be up to around 3khz wide.

raviolo 6y ago
One does not need a lot of bandwidth to trade successfully. In fact, a limited number of signals agreed upon ahead of time is enough. E.g. signal “A” could mean “buy 10 contracts”, signal “B” - “sell 100 contracts”, etc. And you can of course wrap 256 such signals into one byte. So transmitting a single byte at an opportune time let’s you control your trading on the other continent in a quite precise fashion. If you make such transmission, say, 10 times per day your bandwidth utilization is technically 10 bytes per day or about 0.001 bps - yet you can make a ton of money.
- jandrese 6y ago
  All you really need to do is to beat the trade you just saw enter the system so you can buy the trade out from under them and mark it up while their bits are still stuck in glass. You know, "provide liquidity".
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    That’s not at all how it works.
    - jandrese 6y ago
      If not why do they need to have the lowest latency? Seems to me that if you want to provide liquidity what you need to do is buy a wide range of stocks and sit on them so they're all listed and available for trade. But you don't need extremely low latency for that. If you're providing liquidity you should be sitting on an insanely diverse portfolio at the end of every day. The whole point is to make sure trades are available so nobody is waiting for something to appear on the market.

StanislavPetrov 6y ago

>What this means is that some entities are experimenting with the use of the HF bands for the most direct, point-to-point means of conveying this information possible. Interesting that this is now being done with HF bands. For several years, however, this has already been done through the use of lasers (although at a far greater cost). >Last year (2013), Anova completed a laser network link between the London and Frankfurt stock exchanges, and now, it seems the company is nearing completion on a similar laser network between the NYSE and NASDAQ data centers in Mahwah and Carteret, New Jersey. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network-between-nyse-and-nasdaq-will-allow-high-frequency-traders-to-make-even-more-money https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176551-new-laser-network...

dchichkov 6y ago

Just curious. Does anyone know, what is a 35.295 Mhz used for in the Bay Area (Sunnyvale)?

raviolo 6y ago

Could be these guys - they are publicly advertising Chicago to Europe data link via HF radio (for traders, of course): https://www.raft-tech.com/ https://www.raft-tech.com/

zymhan 6y ago
Indeed, the Bloomberg article they link to shows a photo of antenna towers in Aurora, Illinois near the Chicago Mercantile Exchange datacenter https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/companies-pitch-shortwave-radio-to-shave-milliseconds-off-trades https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-17/companies...

mikewarot 6y ago

Morality and outrage aside, we know where they are, and the format they are using, and they are in a fixed site. The real question is: How can we: 1> receive and regenerate the source bit stream 2> use that to exactly recreate the transmitted signal 3> synchronized with that signal, and 4> then use it to cancel out the interference?

meetups323 6y ago
"Hello FTC I'd like a license to intentionally destructively interfere with a separate, licensed, broadcast -- which form should I fill out?"
- asudosandwich 6y ago
  That depends, are you a hobbyist or lobbyist?
analog31 6y ago
Jamming is illegal.
mikewarot 6y ago
To clarify... I'm not proposing to jam the signal, just cancel it out (in the receive channel) so we can listen without the annoyance. With SDR gear, it should be possible to null out most, if not all of the signal, once the modulation format is known.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"It was during this activity that I noticed this massive signal at the top of the 20 meter band, occasionally firing up and clobbering ongoing conversations by U.S. amateurs."

zsellera 6y ago

That waterfall doesn't look like any sensible digital modulation to me, or at least if I were doing HFT, the spectrogram would look totally different. I think the source is rather an unintentional radiator in this case.

astrea 6y ago

This reminds me of the first ever "hack" that used semaphores (not the ones you're thinking of): https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/03/the-worlds-first-cyber-attack-happened.html?m=1 https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/03/the-worlds-first-cyber...

sireat 6y ago
Hacking the semaphores is also plot device in "Count of Monte Cristo" causing the financial ruin of a villain. I wonder if Dumas was inspired by Blanc brothers.

fortran77 6y ago

I have no real opinion on HFT, but I think its outrageous the FCC allows people to interfere with other services like this. Let them use point-to-point microwave relays or fiber cables

audiometry 6y ago

His leap to a conclusion, "this is HFT in Chicago" seems overly precise. Sure, it is a great hypothesis, but not much supplementary evidence.

segfaultbuserr 6y ago
The context here is that there are already speculations and some indirect evidence about High-Frequency Traders on the High Frequency band for years (e.g. see [0] from 2018), which made it a naturally candidate. I'm not saying that it's proved, but a candidate worth investigating. [0] Shortwave Trading | Part I | The West Chicago Tower Mystery 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... [1] SHORTWAVE TRADING | PART II | FAQ AND OTHER CHICAGO AREA SITES https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-trading-part-ii-faq-and-other-chicago-area-sites/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-tr... [2] Shortwave Trading | Part III | Fourth Chicago Site, East Coast, Patent, Regulation, and Farmer Kevin Mystery https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/shortwave-trading-part-iii-fourth-chicago-site-east-coast-patent-regulation-and-farmer-kevin-mystery/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/shortwave-tr...

8bitsrule 6y ago

ARRL mentioned this stuff in June 2018, then crickets. The second link on ka7oei's page, a 2018 discussion among hams, names a few of the perps' ID's. It said 'WJ2XGD' was the only one licensed on 20m.[0] Quote: 'Emission bandwidth shall not extend beyond the bandlimits' = 14-14.99. They're -not- required to ID themselves [Section 5.115] (an eyebrow-raiser).[1] [0] https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=204018&x= https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=204018&x=. [License to M-Wave Networks LLC, Illinois] [1] https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/ham-radio-mentioned-prominently-in-high-frequency-trading-story.617581/ https://forums.qrz.com/index.php?threads/ham-radio-mentioned... This long, archived page about HFT tech briefly considers the HF option considerations (search for 'HAM radio') [2] [https://web.archive.org/web/20171012010437/https://meanderful.blogspot.in/2017/05/lines-radios-and-cables-oh-my.html https://web.archive.org/web/20171012010437/https://meanderfu...]

vgrigorescu 6y ago

Think I found them. Using the update from the bottom of the page: > … and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. I found this petition from M-Wave Networks, LLC for permission to build 4 towers in Kane County, Illinois: https://www.countyofkane.org/FDER/Zoning%20Petitions%20Documents/Petition%204564.pdf https://www.countyofkane.org/FDER/Zoning%20Petitions%20Docum... The location in the petition is approx. 41.82907908782928, -88.4940281199101, which is about 16 miles (27 km) from the center coordinate of the TDOA map (41.60, -88.60). Not bad given the caveat of "the above location is likely accurate to only a few 10s of km at best." The e-mail address in the petition has the domain tower-research.com, which is a high-frequency trading firm. The only thing I'm confused about is that the zoning petition was discussed at the meeting on Dec 8th 2020. If it was approved, it seems remarkably fast to build a tower given that the article was from Dec 15th.

tlrobinson 6y ago
> If it was approved, it seems remarkably fast to build a tower given that the article was from Dec 15th. It makes sense they moved quickly, since there's a limited time period where they'd have this advantage over other firms which set up similar systems.

souprock 6y ago

Someday the traders will be beaming neutrinos through the Earth.

kreelman 6y ago
...Maybe one day they'll have quantum entangled particles and they'll be able to do spooky things at a distance and communicate instantly? I don't pretend to understand the physics, but sounds like it would be interesting... if it could work. Perhaps then Radio Amateurs would become Amateur Tanglers?
- welterde 6y ago
  While it is spooky interaction at a distance it can't be used to transfer information faster than light. In simple terms, the states are correlated, but you have no way to influence what they are. You get a random number and know instantly what the other random number of the remote particle is, but that doesn't transfer any information from you to the remote location or vice-versa. The most obvious explanation would have been that there is some kind of hidden state and they don't interact at all anymore, but that doesn't appear to be the case.
retzkek 6y ago
Fermilab is very close to the CME data center and is focused on neutrino research now, maybe a good opportunity for a partnership for some extra funding...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

OpticalWindows 6y ago

Neat. thanks for the article lmh

rlt 6y ago

There was speculation Starlink could be used for HFT once it gets laser links, but this would even beat that since you don't need to travel up and down an extra 500 miles, plus any buffering in the satellites. Starlink would have more bandwidth, but you probably don't need much for HFT.