6 ms·
How could a trade be executed in microseconds considering that light travels 300m in 1 microsecond? It would seem that low latency connections to NASDAQ trading
by troystribling 17y ago
How could a trade be executed in microseconds considering that light travels 300m in 1 microsecond? It would seem that low latency connections to NASDAQ trading systems would high priced real estate. Is this something that NASDAQ sells?
- tricky 17y agoI wasn't involved in the real estate side of things so I don't know how we got the space, but I did work for a company that had machines right on the trading floor of almost every exchange in the world. So, I think the answer to your question is probably, yes.
- spitfire 17y agoYes, the nyse, nasdaq and such rent floor space for systems. You get a high speed(low-latency), unencrypted (low latency), unpassword protected (low-latency), low-latency connection with very low-latency characteristics directly into trading engines. They go to great lengths to ensure low-latency performance. Currently there'll be tons of hifi hedge funds upgrading to nahalem processors and measuring how much faster each individual instruction is. Cutting fiber optic wire to the exact length to lower latencies, then measuring to make sure they don't have any retransmits due to bounceback, etc. If you're able to reliably make $0.01 on each trade you'll be more than willing to spend hundreds of millions on hardware. Microseconds matter, because they add up to milliseconds.