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Ham radio enthusiasts vs. High-frequency traders: A battle for the airwaves
- AlbertCory 3y agohttps://archive.ph/eqNVE https://archive.ph/eqNVE
- AlbertCory 3y agoHigh-frequency trading: now there's something the world needs more of /s You could argue that ham radio is an antiquated niche, but at least there's some social benefit (emergency communications, for example).
- dahfizz 3y agoDo you have a 401k?
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI'm not the one you're asking, but yes, I do. So? Do you think the value of my 401k depends on HFT? I don't.
- Spooky23 3y agoBefore HFT, stock exchanges couldn’t provide liquidity and wide spreads cost retail investors tens of dollars a year. When you retire, every time you go to Starbucks, you can rest assured that the savings on your 401k distribution will allow you get an extra shot, once a month. The innovators making this possible of course skim billions, but you get that free shot.
- candiddevmike 3y agoI don't think eliminating sub second stock trading would impact this scenario.
- cosmojg 3y ago> wide spreads cost retail investors tens of dollars a year. A veritable tragedy! I'm happy to accept the unnecessary risk of economy-breaking flash crashes if it means I can afford an extra shot of espresso once or twice a year.
- Ekaros 3y agoHmm, so let's say 50 saving, and over 40 years that would make 2000... Okay, not counting compounding interest. But on other hand how much wealth do they extract from the system? Is that more or less than the 2000 per person?
- lotsofpulp 3y agoConsidering that no one is stopping anyone from making an exchange that prohibits HFT, yet none exist is a pretty good signal that they extract less wealth than the value they provide.
- AlbertCory 3y ago> Before HFT, stock exchanges couldn’t provide liquidity demonstrably false. "Liquidity" was available even before the dawn of networking. It was called "the ticker." Anyone with a ticker could see the last trade in a given stock. You could call your broker and he/she would convert your stock into cash (minus commission). It was just slower. As in Ticker Tape Parade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker-tape_parade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker-tape_parade
- slashdev 3y agoThe steelman argument is that it makes financial markets more efficient and decreases spreads, hence giving you better prices when you buy and sell. I think the reality is usually more complex and nuanced. Does it help your average retail investor more than it hurts? Maybe.
- cameldrv 3y agoEither way, having the arbitrage between the U.S. and Euro markets be 9ms faster does absolutely nothing for anyone's 401k.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- growse 3y agoLarge fund managers (e.g. Fidelity) disagree with you.
- AlbertCory 3y agoMaybe make a point here, if you have one?
- DontchaKnowit 3y agodon't worry! Algorithmic/high frequency traders provide "liquidity"! We couldn't live without it!
- gruez 3y agoAs opposed to ham radio?
- DontchaKnowit 3y agomy comment was in reply to this : High-frequency trading: now there's something the world needs more of /s
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- retrac 3y agoAmateur radio isn't just voice and Morse. In most countries if you want to build your own transmitters, especially in a private hobby capacity, you need an amateur licence. HF at 3 - 30 MHz happens to be low freq. enough that a fast standard ADC and DAC can work as a direct conversion SDR. Surprised I don't see more projects around that yet.
- thenobsta 3y agoHere is the link to the FCC docket. Looks like comments can be still be added. https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/results?q=(proceedings.name:(%22RM-11953%22) https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/search-filings/results?q=(pr...) Edit: looks like hn escapes the parentheses in the docket query. Here’s a short link — http://bit.ly/45nSowI http://bit.ly/45nSowI
- hasmanean 3y agoI’d rather comment here. ;) I hope they don’t plan to use the ham bands. They are jammed with traffic while the much bigger commercial shortwave bands next door are empty! If they do allocate spectrum for fixed commercial use, I hope they allocate equally spaced bands (like hams use) so that you can send digital signals and not have to filter out the harmonics.
- lb1lf 3y agoWell, you still have to filter out your harmonics, but the upside (to other users) is that if the bands you use are harmonically related, your failure to produce a clean signal mostly is an issue for other users of the same class - rather than making a mess for anybody else.
- tracedddd 3y agoHam bands are jammed with traffic? My experience is you can barely find anyone, except on repeaters, and even then it’s pretty quiet besides during scheduled check-ins in the evening (or similar events.) I even travel with my radio. It seems to be this way across the United States. If you’d be open to sharing, I’d love to know where it’s so saturated. That said, I don’t want commercial interests to take the amateur bands either, but I do believe they need to modernized. I think some of the space should be unallocated, and left that way, so people can experiment with minimal restriction.
- MandieD 3y agoIf you’re into digital stuff on HF like I am, 20 and 40 are particularly crowded, but I’ll agree that most of the VHF and UHF repeaters in Germany aren’t heavily used.
- ianburrell 3y agoI am not sure how it is a conflict. The HFT proposal doesn’t reallocate the amateur HF frequencies but uses other frequencies. They propose using really high power which could cause interference but interference is illegal. I think the danger is that HFT will make HF bands valuable and there will be push to acquire the amateur bands.
- lightlyused 3y agoAnd certain people would gladly sell a public resource for private profit because you know lobbyist dollars and billionaire hush payments would go to those that would make that decision.
- thenobsta 3y agoAgreed, the precedent set, if goes through, seems fraught and ripe for attempts at expanding the spectrum usage.
- cma 3y agoIt adds no value and shouldn't waste this resource. Latency arbitragers get rewarded based on beating the next best: they get the same reward for beating next-best by 100ms as for beating by 1us. There is no net value to society for the difference, but lots of resources wasted in achieving it once competition has reached that level, squandering most of the reward on in the forms of data center waste heat, spectrum waste, and soon probably rocket exhaust.
- StingyJelly 3y agoI'm not ham operator so I'm just guessing here, but they may be talking about interference at the receiver. The new signal may be so strong and near enough ham band, that even after attenuation by typical band-pass filter it's still the strongest component and will overwhelm input stage amplifier. Trivial solution for that would be adding a band-stop filter tuned for the frequencies used for HFT but that again may add noise and attenuate nearby frequencies.
- wbl 3y agoIn HF the limiting noise is not receiver generated unlike in microwaves and (ideal) capacitors and inductors don't generate noise: resistors and active components do. However a sharp notch is a real pain to make in analogue domain. Lots of stages, temperature changes the component values, and things get bulky.
- candiddevmike 3y agoWonder if they could force this to be unencrypted (I'm assuming it will be) so anyone with a radio could leverage the data somehow
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- SkipperCat 3y agoA lot of this traffic is point-to-point, meaning that if you're not in the line of sight, you'd never see the data. So as long as nobody puts up a pirate radio tower, there's not much need for encryption.
- klez 3y ago> So as long as nobody puts up a pirate radio tower, there's not much need for encryption. Maybe I'm over-extrapolating here, but isn't this the same kind of reasoning that gave us MITM-attacks in clear-text http?
- SkipperCat 3y agoI think the difference is that its not very hard to plug a computer into a switch and sniff network traffic. But it is extremely hard to stand up a 300' tower in the middle of a corn field and MITM microwave signals. The chance of anyone pulling that off before being busted is all but nil.
- BenjiWiebe 3y agoPoint to point at HF frequencies doesn't really exist. The wavelengths are huge and directionality is poor. I mean, you can set up point to point communications, but people quite a distance away will be able to make it point to multi-point.
- cosmojg 3y agoI don't get why the SEC doesn't enforce a minimum tick rate of one second. Heck, even one whole minute would barely exceed the noise floor. High-frequency trading doesn't need to exist, and the brilliant minds bashing their heads against the problem could be pursuing far more productive endeavors.
- 542458 3y ago> High-frequency trading doesn't need to exist Neither does most of the stock market, for many definitions of “need”. But on the flip side, nobody has ever really demonstrated strong negative effects from HFT and many studies show positive effects, so bans seem very kneejerk to me.
- stefan_ 3y agoThe point is that whatever function you think HFT serves can be done just as well at fixed tick rates. This whole latency optimization mini game is just a pure waste.
- super256 3y agoAnd in which order would orders be executed when they come in and get queued? A delay wouldn't fix anything because the queue would still be FIFO. The only way to remove HTF would be removing the trading session, and instead only offering the market auction. Btw, a "tick" in trading is the minimum up/down movement of an asset (e.g. 0.25 points on NQ, or 0.01 on TSLA).
- denotational 3y ago> Btw, a "tick" in trading is the minimum up/down movement of an asset (e.g. 0.25 points on NQ, or 0.01 on TSLA). This is true, but the term is overloaded: if I say "the exchange slid the price one tick to comply with Reg. NMS" then I'm using it in the sense you mean; if I say "the model recomputes on each tick" then I'm using it in the sense of the GP.
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- seamac3 3y agoWhy don't the stock market traders just use satellite? Shouldn't those transmissions be faster than cable transmission? They are only gaining milliseconds right? I wonder who will be affected. It seems like a lot of wattage, but the stock traders antennas are located in the upper US.
- mgamache 3y agoThey measure performance in microseconds.
- AlbertCory 3y agoSpeed of light. They actually want to locate their servers inside the market buildings, to gain those precious nanoseconds.
- Espressosaurus 3y agoSatellites mean you are eating round trip delay times to orbit and back, encode and decode on both ends, signal strength competition, etc. It's a bad trade. Speed of light limits are a big limiting factor, which is another way of saying you want to minimize your total transmission distance. Going into orbit increases your total transmission distance. If you can afford to put in the infrastructure, you never want to go into orbit.
- catiopatio 3y agoMicroseconds matter to them; even with a satellite in low-earth orbit (~342 mile), you’re looking at a round-trip time of 3.68ms, on top of any packet latency introduced by the satellite itself. It’s always going to be faster to go point-to-point than pay the light-speed cost of bouncing all the way out to orbit and back.
- pdntspa 3y agoTheir latency requirements are such that they want as straight and short a line as possible because a larger round-trip eats up precious nanoseconds. The speed of light is not fast enough for these folks
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- JakeAl 3y agoHFT allows the Market Makers to have total control over the price. They literally intercept all orders for most institutionally owned stocks in order to manage the allocation/inventory of shares to make sure shares are available to users of the different brokerage services, and in doing so track the value of all of their initial contracts so they can keep the most valuable contracts and only sell those in the money (you don't actually buy shares, you lease contracts that give you the same rights as those shares and if you want the actual shares you have to submit a special request, so the Market Makers are just managing and tracking contracts which they sell each f a certain number of times at a given price before moving on.)
- SkipperCat 3y agoYou are not correct. HFT firms do not have total control over the price. You, as a retail or institutional investor, can set the price of any stock you wish to buy or sell. And everyone else has 100% control if they want to transact with you at that price. Also, HFT firms do not intercept any institutional orders. The race for speed is so they can be the first to transact against orders which are publicly announced at an exchange. I have to stress on the word "public". Exchange are marketplaces where many institutions publicly display their prices to buy and sell stocks. No orders get "intercepted" before they hit the marketplace. If anyone did do that, it would be against the law. And please don't confuse market order flow for front running. The rules and regs around order flow are very clear and firms that would violate that would be fined into bankruptcy for violation. I really can't make heads or tails of your last point, but Market Makers are obligated to provide liquidity at exchanges and their prices are based off of what people want to buy/sell. Its not that complex and if you don't want to transact at their prices, you're welcome not to do so.
- rdm70 3y agoMultiple big market makers pay for order flow in the United States, which results in orders getting intercepted before they hit the public markets. They are generally given some price improvement relative to the public BBO, so the argument is that customers filled via PFOF are better off. However one second-order effect of PFOF which argues against this is that PFOF makes it less attractive for non-PFOF firms to participate on the exchange. Because small customer trades, which are generally low information content, have been filled off exchange, only the larger and riskier trades trade on the exchange. This causes spreads to be wider on the exchange than otherwise. Some European exchanges have banned PFOF. I think these exchanges are working OK without it.
- woopsn 3y agoFiber and microwave work just fine. There's inequity but at least it's among the players. Radio spectrum is needed by real industries, emergency services, medical, normal people, etc.
- PhilipRoman 3y agoI thought they all have direct cables to the important exchanges, beating any wireless medium.
- kunwon1 3y agoMicrowave towers between e.g. Chicago and NYC achieve lower latencies than fiber optic cables. Signals travel faster through the air HFT pays huge sums for lower latencies. This is just the next step in their progression As an amateur radio enthusiast, I say leave the bands alone and let them figure out something else
- bombela 3y agoWireless has lower latency, since it can be beamed in a straight line. Fiber has to follow geography and infrastructur, making the path physically longer.
- superkuh 3y agoPlus the speed of light in a medium like an optical fiber is slower than in air.
- sidewndr46 3y agoNo, you can't just beam RF energy directly through the Earth in a straight line. That isn't going to work at all.
- bombela 3y agoOf course not. But point to point microwave will be a shorter and faster path than the meandering fibers. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/priva...
- vitaflo 3y agoThis isn’t technically a straight line as you need to bounce the signals off the ionosphere. But it’s still faster in any case.
- miki123211 3y ago[flagged]
- brian-armstrong 3y agoYeah, I agree. We should also ban cooking your own food, painting your own walls, repairing your own car, hemming your own clothes, growing your own food, and reading to learn outside of an accredited context. The people who do these things are sick weirdos and it would be good for the economy.
- maister 3y ago> What service does ham radio actually provide to society? Ham radio allows the public to use slices of the radio spectrum. If someone wanted to "hack" on RF projects, what should this person do if the entire spectrum was given to companies and governments + militaries instead? If you are arguing against ham radio you are basically arguing against hacking, tinkering and experimenting.
- livueta 3y agoYou're proposing a false dilemma because there's a third option: make some of it ISM. Today, way more hacking, tinkering and experimenting happens on ISM bands than on HAM bands. I've written about this before so won't spam the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36714225
- vvanders 3y agoThe ISM bands are much, much more limited in other countries(eg duty cycle). I agree that really interesting stuff is happening in ISM space however reallocating ham allocations doesn't seem like the right path forward. FWIW I think repealing the symbol rate restrictions and opening up bands a bit more would go a long way towards the spirit that ham was started with. The hobby seems pretty ossified these days and it would be great to see more advancements in digital modes and stuff closer to the state of the art.
- jdadj 3y agoAmusingly, Alex Gerko offered the hams some cash to fund their lawsuit. He's the founder and CEO of XTX Markets and supposedly has a net worth of $11b. https://twitter.com/AlexanderGerko/status/1687828301555933184 https://twitter.com/AlexanderGerko/status/168782830155593318...
- rootsudo 3y agoNot really amusingly, it's pretty obvious why.
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- tomjakubowski 3y agoit's pretty obvious why the chicken crossed the road. and the joke is still amusing
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago> it's pretty obvious why the chicken crossed the road ...but it isn't, that's why it's an entire category of jokes.
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- hilbert42 3y agoSuggestions: 1. Sell them a faster-than-light solution. 2. Hold regular field-days/contests outside their RX antenna farms. 3. Go retro and use Tesla coils for TXs.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoSo once again we see something owned by the public co-opted by big business and potentially ruined for one-time greed. Once this spectrum gets trounced and every trading firm is on board, the playing field is once again level and there has been no net gain. Depressing and outrageous.
- lifeline82 3y agoFor those old enough (in internet timescale) to remember the sniper in Mawa blog https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/ https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/
- jcalvinowens 3y agoThe only reason HFT players want these shortwave transmitters is that the other players are getting them too, and they have to compete. Once everybody has shortwave transmitters, they will no longer have any benefit, they will just become a new mandatory entry cost. That's an enormous waste of resources (both human capital and spectrum). Why not just make trading using radio below 30MHz illegal? It completely solves the problem with no tangible downside. If nobody else can do it, nobody has any reason to start doing it. Enforcement would be trivial.
- sidewndr46 3y agoWhat the heck would it matter? They'd just start asking for 30.1 MHz allocations from the FCC.
- jcalvinowens 3y agoIf they could make skywave propagation work consistently between two fixed locations at >30MHz, I would be very surprised. The lower bands are the ones that work well (particularly 3-14MHz at this point in the solar cycle). Yes, you can get sporadic skywave as high as 50MHz sometimes... but it's really random and unreliable. They call it the "magic band" for a reason.
- nullc 3y agoEhh.. How much power are you imagining? Scatter propagation at 50 MHz is more consistent than sporadic-E just very weak (and calls for some particular modulation techniques due to path characteristics). And through much of the year you do get a window of sporadic-E pretty much every day.
- jcalvinowens 3y agoAssuming the path is NYC-London or Chicago-London... it's just too far north to work in winter. Even at night in the summer, I'd bet against it. To some extent we can debate what "consistently" means... if like these guys, you have ~10KW of power with beam antennas the size of trucks on both ends, you can probably approach the reliability of a submarine cable (albeit at incomprehensibly narrower bandwidth). Low VHF propagation will have significant periods of unavailability in comparison, no matter how much power you use.