If you want to participate in a financial or other business system, you need to observe their timekeeping system, which is generally UTC. If you say “well OUR country is using domestic time”, that’s fine, but business is still going to be conducted in UTC. You can use that clock, or use your own and risk things happening at the wrong time. Kind of like when you’re in different time zones and forget to account for that and show up to a party an hour late.
But the real thing is high-frequency trading. Instead of buying and selling days, weeks, or longer periods apart, trades are made with large sums based on market movements in milliseconds. If you can see that a stock is jumping upwards by a few cents over a short time, that doesn’t sound like much, until you put $1,000 on a 1% gain and make a quick $10. That doesn’t sound like much, but do that thousands of times a day, every day, and you can make a lot of money.
milliseconds? We are in the nanosecond now. 10-20ns round trip on 10G or 25G card, in a server which is in the next room of NASDAQ servers to minimize transfer time. Doing millions of transactions per second.
When a packet is received on the RX line, decoded byte per byte (yes, at 25GBps), a packet is sent at the same time on the TX line byte per byte, when the RX byte with the price is decoded, the FPGA determine if you should sell/buy and send the TX byte accordingly on the bus. This takes nanoseconds.
I don’t actually work in that space, so I was being conservative with my scales, but I figured it’d be something like that. I didn’t know they were doing it on FPGAs now though!
If you want to participate in a financial or other business system, you need to observe their timekeeping system, which is generally UTC. If you say “well OUR country is using domestic time”, that’s fine, but business is still going to be conducted in UTC. You can use that clock, or use your own and risk things happening at the wrong time. Kind of like when you’re in different time zones and forget to account for that and show up to a party an hour late.
But the real thing is high-frequency trading. Instead of buying and selling days, weeks, or longer periods apart, trades are made with large sums based on market movements in milliseconds. If you can see that a stock is jumping upwards by a few cents over a short time, that doesn’t sound like much, until you put $1,000 on a 1% gain and make a quick $10. That doesn’t sound like much, but do that thousands of times a day, every day, and you can make a lot of money.
milliseconds? We are in the nanosecond now. 10-20ns round trip on 10G or 25G card, in a server which is in the next room of NASDAQ servers to minimize transfer time. Doing millions of transactions per second.
When a packet is received on the RX line, decoded byte per byte (yes, at 25GBps), a packet is sent at the same time on the TX line byte per byte, when the RX byte with the price is decoded, the FPGA determine if you should sell/buy and send the TX byte accordingly on the bus. This takes nanoseconds.
I don’t actually work in that space, so I was being conservative with my scales, but I figured it’d be something like that. I didn’t know they were doing it on FPGAs now though!
It’s disgusting to me that we’re wasting this kind of computational power, as a species, for generating wealth instead of science.
That’s nothing compared to the useless calculations that are powering the shitcoins
aren’t they adding delay lines, so everyone has the exact physical cable distance to the stock servers?
For a while they were keeping microwave towers running to facilitate quicker transmissions. But I’m not sure what the current state is.