Yes, the nyse, nasdaq and such rent floor space for systems. You get a high speed(low-latency), unencrypted (low latency), unpassword protected (low-latency), l

Yes, 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.