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Wall St. Trading Servers To Power Off-Hour Clouds?
miller60 writes "As cloud computing gains traction, some Wall Street firms running armadas of servers to power high-frequency trading operations are contemplating leasing out their excess computing capacity after the trading day ends at 4 p.m. 'Once 4:30 rolls around, we don't need those machines,' said one CTO of a market data firm. 'There may be an opportunity there.' A similar revelation led to the creation of the cloud computing operation at Amazon.com, which built its infrastructure to handle peak Christmas-season loads that lasted just a few weeks each year."
I wonder if this poses any security concerns or problems? Is letting 'cloud users' access the servers that run out financial markets really a good idea?
This seems like a security nightmare waiting to happen. I understand everything would likely be virtualized, but it just makes me nervous that you would be able to rent time on servers that interact with the stock market, especially considering how panicky the market can be, and how badly everyone suffers when it does panic.
Compuserve was founded by a life insurance company to make a consumer service run on their business systems with the expectation that the consumers would use it during non-working hours.
When it comes down to it, nobody needs their clock cycles 24/7 at even load, even though that's what computers are designed to do. Shared services for the win!
$20 says this idea was cooked up by someone who heard about "cloud computing" on the radio while in his cushy office, signing official looking papers and making a big fuss about "revenue".
Living With a Nerd
I sure hope Wall Street is utterly confident in the security of their operating systems, VMs, low-level peripheral firmware, etc. Because if they're not absolutely confident, they should treat all of those machines as potentially untrusted from the moment they open them up to the world. This holds even if they constantly re-image.
When you're talking about the kind of money Wall Street stands to lose from a clever security breach, no amount of paranoia is too ridiculous.
Not to derail the conversation, but high frequency trading doesn't contribute much to the stock market's ability to set optimal prices.
What actually happens is that high frequency traders squeeze in while prices are moving and they siphon off money. Neither the original seller, nor the original buyer gets the best price, and the high frequency traders make a mint.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Said the CTO who is now looking for a job.
NYSE closes at 4:30. But there are other markets. And the data flows 24/7.
There is no reason for these systems to have spare cycles.
Yes. If Amazon went down tomorrow and never came back, society would be fine. If the stock exchange were taken over by malicious but hidden computer software for months, and then finally was taken down, the damage to society would be MUCH more severe. It's not just a way of exchanging everything, it's a way of establishing who owns what. If suddenly nobody knows who really owns every stock that's traded in the last six months, we've got a major frikkin problem. We shouldn't, maybe, but we do because money is an illusion.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
consult with his technical people.
What am I thinking, Of course not.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In fact, with after hours trading and foreign markets, it really does run 24/7, just not on the floor of the NYSE (and not as liquid).
I would posit that a good reason for this might be that the stock market is already panicky enough and being closed for most of the 24 hour day gives people a little more time to thing about what is going on. A perfect example is companies that release earnings and other important news after the closing bell. It gives people time to process the information rather than giving the fastest guy a chance to make a quick profit. For the *real* purpose of the stock exchange, it does not need to be open. If your goal is to raise capital for a business (or invest in one) rather than speculate and day-trade, the current market hours are just fine.
Bottles.
I dream that this entire high frequency scam is declared illegal and all involved are placed where they belong with all of their property confiscated.
Here is what happens when HFT is done: 2 parties agree on a price, the HFT meddles with in a way, that takes out money from the transaction, so the buyer sells lower and the seller buys higher. That little bit of difference is stolen by HFT.
These are thieves, we are discussing here, understand that. So they found a way to make some profit on their infrastructure? Well, great for them. 4,000,000 transactions per second they are talking about for one shop. That's 4,000,000 thefts per second.
You can't handle the truth.
All trading instructions, no matter how technologically implemented, come from people. Somebody has to write and fund the program that says "Buy XXXX when its price reaches $Y" even if they're not attending it at the time it happens.
Just look at what a mess after-hours markets are. Sometimes they're offering tomorrow's price today, but sometimes they get bent out of shape. Don't you dare buy a stock Jim Cramer promotes on Mad Money in after hours... somebody who owns that stock would love to jack up the price on you. Worse yet, somebody can short that stock and likely have a profit by 9:30am the next business morning.
If you want 24/7 markets, try currency trading. The US Dollar is up for trades at nearly all hours of the day.
I guess if an idea is 20+ years old the statute of limitations has run out and someone can use it again as NEW and EXCITING.
Can someone post a source for the claim that Amazon did EC2 because of Christmas time servers that are no longer in use during the year?
You'll probably get sources, as Amazon said so initially. Of course that's best forgotten now as it has become an inconvenient fact.
Notice how every Christmas their servers go down due to mysterious "hackers" poisoning their DNS server or what not. Every year - a different excuse, and every time - around Christmas.
Basically, don't use Amazon if you have mission critical processing around Christmas, or even worse, if you expect a peak around Christmas.
It could be secure, given the following constraints:
1. The computers contain NO mass storage at all.
2. The mass storage is external to the computer and is disconnected from the computer during cloud computing.
3. The computer is rebooted from CD (or DVD) before and after cloud computing.
Of course, the odds on those constraints being met are pretty low if non-technical types are involved.
linquendum tondere
Well, I'm in the business too, and I'm not going to break my NDAs and specify whose MS software I service. But I do write and maintain apps for some pretty big traders (and directly related financial businesses). There's lots of MS platforms in their core business ops. Lots of Windows server farms, particularly running SQL Server and business objects. Tremendous horsepower, both in-house, and colo at telco hotels for low latency to exchanges - and at leasable datacenters. And starting to move some services to clouds. They're interested in Azure, and waiting to see what it's like when it's ready for prime time.
But their biggest obstacle is letting their data and algorithms, or anything in their critical path, live at Microsoft. If they had an Azure cloud distributed among the locations they control themselves, they might be closer to moving their apps to that model.
And if they could make money off their sunk hardware costs while it's "sleeping" (except for some hefty datamining and OLAP procs), they would. They'd sell their grandmother if it had a chance at a profit. And computing services rarely sell for less than the power and other ops costs to run them.
So there's probably a future in this. I wonder who else has seen more of it than I have yet. So far, only people who haven't have chimed in here.
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make install -not war