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LSE Breaks World Record In Trade Speed With Linux
LingNoi writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK: "The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times. The news comes ahead a major Linux-based switchover in twelve days, during which the open source system will replace Microsoft .Net technology on the group's main stock exchange. The LSE had long been criticised on speed and reliability, grappling with trading speeds of several hundred microseconds. The 126 microsecond speed is 'twice as fast' as its main international competitors, the London Stock Exchange said. BATS Europe and Chi-X, two dedicated electronic rivals to the LSE, are reported to have an average latency of 250 and 175 microseconds respectively. Neither company immediately provided details. But many of the LSE's older and more traditional rivals offer speeds of around 300 to 400 microseconds. Nevertheless, Linux is now standard in many exchanges, including the New York Stock Exchange."
Trades that happen this fast are only good for further enriching large investment firms that can afford to spend millions on clever algorithms for shuffling numbers around. This speedup lets these companies make even more money without creating one damned thing that's useful to any living person.
Limit trades to one per second per institution, and while you're at it, add that tiny per-trade tax. Finance should be boring. Let's encourage people to focus on the real economy that operates in the world inhabited by you and me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwSM55bsCrM
I could watch it over & over... It puts a smile on my face... :)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10036286-62.html
Cheers... Clark
Communist Linux - bringing speed and efficiency to the dregs of capitalism.
The record breaking times were measured on the LSE's Turquoise smaller dark pool trading venue, where trades are conducted anonymously.
Dark pools are part of the problem.
Transparency is critical for a functional marketplace.
Dark pools only require trades to be listed after the fact...
Which isn't as useful as it sounds, even if brokerages weren't completing the trades in/across-house, where disclosure is not required.
Anonymity and secrecy are anathema to a functional market
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Trade-speed is irrelevant to investors.
It's relevant to highly speculative robot-trader algorithms that try to make a profit by arbitraging sub-second timing-issues. But this is a zero-sum game: one trader can only gain $X by taking advantage of timing if other traders lose PRECISELY $X, so to the sum of traders, this is irrelevant.
Stock-exchanges, make a living trough fees. The fees are coupled with volume, i.e. a broker that has a larger volume of orders, will pay higher fees.
So lower latency is good for the stock-exchange, neutral for traders on equal grounds and negative for those suckers who play at daytrading. It -does- tilt the table towards those with machinery though, but the effect is irrelevant for traders who aren't extremely short-term.
In short: yet another reason to invest rather than speculate.
If you buy and sell 20 times today, each time with the table tilted a tenth of a promille against you, you'll on the average lose 2 promille, plus the fees. This doesn't sound like much, but a trader that does this 200 days a year, will have lost 20% of his profit to the tilted table. (if his flat-table profits where less than 20%, he'd thus run a minus)
Meanwhile, the investor, who holds stock on the average 5 years, will also lose a tenth of a promille in every transaction, but since he's got 2 transactions in 5 years, that works out to 0.4 transactions/year -- thus his loss relative to the flat table is 0.4 * 0.01% = 0.004% pro year, which is irrelevant.
It was costing them so much to maintain their systems due to support and modification contracts that they just out and out bought an ENTIRE company whose sole product was...trading systems (For about 50 million'ish pounds IIRC).
In essence they bought a development department lock stock and barrel and it was STILL cheaper than their existing setup.
Yep, and major trading firms will do anything to get closer to the exchange servers. I worked for a Major Bank which had a major data centre well outside London which hosted all the "slow" apps, and a small (but well cooled) server room in the City a few blocks from the LSE building. Each and every app in the central data room had to justify its need, and every so often you would hear about acquisitions of real estate closer still.
This is of course pre-2008; I'm no longer so intimate with the details of server rooms at major banks. C'est la vie.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Remember that this very stock exchange moving to a purely Microsoft/.NET based solution was widely touted in Microsoft's so-called 'Get the "Facts"' campaign. Microsoft was involved (with Accenture) in the implementation of the project, not just in selling some Windows licenses. So this screwup should really be a PR disaster for them. If Microsoft themselves cannot even get a .NET project to work in places where their Linux-using competitors have no trouble at all (Chi-X is also Linux-based), then that sure looks like a platform in trouble to me.
Remember that the entire thing crashed down for an entire trading day, something that you can imagine didn't go over well, and together with the high latencies and other numerous problems, was the reason they dumped it for Linux.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
The world of high finance has become just a bunch of racks frantically swapping bits around.
Yet when it screws up, the shocks are felt everywhere, for some reason.
Something is sick on this planet, when automated behaviour of electronic systems decide who eats, who can buy a new mansion, who gets a miserably low pension, whose house is going to be taken away and who's going to pocket a billion dollars in profit.
I'm more and more coming over to the side of those that say the whole finance sector is parasitic in nature and needs to be destroyed.
The software was written by Accenture with assistance from Microsoft, so that would tell you all you need to know.
Prices are discrete, quantized, non-differentiable, etc.
Prices are chaotic and somewhat fractal.
Going faster does not solve this. Think of sign(sin(1/x)) as x approaches zero; it changes rapidly but this doesn't make it smooth.
Hourly trades would be reasonable. You get a few minutes to submit secret bids, the exchange gets nearly a half hour to match them up, the exchange gets a few minutes to publish results, and you get nearly a half hour to decide on your next bid.
There is no reason that the finances of normal corporations and normal investors should be subjected to the abuse of today's stock market.
The idea of government only preventing someone from directly interfering with the freedom of others sounds great until you realize that (1) everything everyone does affects everyone else, so the only way to actually satisfy this constraint is for everyone to do nothing, (2) not only is it possible to harm people through second-order and higher effects, that's the overwhelmingly dominant means by which people in industrialized countries come to harm today, so relaxing the constraint to not directly harming others is effectively useless, and (3) the relationships between cause and effect are, a large majority of the time, of such high order that accurately and objectively assigning blame/responsibility for harm is effectively impossible. The world is vastly too complex to be effectively managed by an idea so simplistic or black & white.
Absent the availability of a superhuman-class intellect that's both able and willing to solve the optimization problem, we settle for global stability constraints. Stamping out actions whose only tangible effect is to crash whole stock markets so hard the operators hit the big red "Shut. Down. Everything." button sounds like a damn fine constraint to me. Or, "your freedom to be a greedy dick or a panicking moron ends where the viability of the world's economy begins."
So, yeah, let them make money off people who aren't as good at stock trading as fast as they like. Doing otherwise would basically be telling them they're not allowed to make any more money because you find the amount they already have distasteful. Pretty much 100% sour grapes.
If the only outcome of people trading on the stock market and failing was less $$$ in their pockets, I couldn't possibly care less - just as I don't care about casinos and lotteries.
The problem is that, when stock markets fuck-up big time (again), the ripple effect is severe enough that the only way to avoid it is to stock up on supplies and bug out to the woods. We've seen this in practice more than once already. Since, in the end, I somehow find my paycheck been affected, I feel perfectly entitled to advocate for stock market regulation.
Your freedom ends where my nose begins - but, in a working society, we all have our noses stuck into each other's business, so in practice the point is moot.
Okay, well to anyone who's ever had to work with Accenture code, it would tell them a lot.
I agree wholeheartedly that it has nothing to do with MS vs Linux, I think it has to do with another shoddy Accenture implementation. Even the .NET decision has nothing to do with it IMO, I'm a firm believer that algorithms and design have far more impact than OS or language choice.
Oh, and calm the hell down. It's a discussion, not a flamewar.
Well, obviously the LSE wanted a real-time system and Accenture and Microsoft used .NET, which was a total failure on their part. You cannot do real-time with .NET - Idjits...
Then on top of being dog slow, it fell over, costing the LSE a ton of money. So they probably implemented it with an Access DB and Exchange mail server as well.
So, MS touted this as a major win and then fell on their asses.
1. Euphoria:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080303191622/www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=51828
2. Reality:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_suffers_net_crash
3. Tux to the rescue:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/networking/3244936/london-stock-exchange-smashes-world-record-trade-speed-with-linux%22%22
4. The dead cat bounce?
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/charts/chartdl.aspx?symbol=MSFT&CP=0&PT=11
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If you want to stabilize the global economy put a tax on all stock trades. Stocks and shares should be long term planning, not microsecond.
No sig today...
Arguably the most important idea of communism was that workers own the tools of their trade. In traditional sense, this could mean (Marx didn't really go into the details of the implementation) that workers of a factory democratically vote for all the important issues (wages, etc.) and as such the workers benefit from their work (as opposed to one guy at the top pocketing the money) if they do it well... and have to tighten the belt or begin doing something else if they do the job is unnecessary or done poorly. There was more about the utopia that this would lead to, but that was the primary concept.
It is indeed true that socializing medicine has nothing to do with communism. Socialism means that government owns the production facilities, Communism means that workers own them, Capitalism (In original meaning of the word, not as a synonym for "free trade") means that some other private entity benefits from the people who work for him. The three are mutually exclusive concepts and communism is at least as far (perhaps further) away from socialism than capitalism is. After all, communism and capitalism both rely on question and demand while socialism includes the idea that some things aren't economically feasible but should be provided for the people anyways. Communism is effectively capitalism where workers of a company own all its stock and each worker owns a fair portition (Not necessarily "equal" as people who have worked there longer could own more because of that and it would still be canon).
Now, Linux is - to some extent - communism. It obviously isn't socialism (no government owns it) and it isn't capitalism (nobody at the top owns it and benefits from the people who work for him) but rather the community (the people who work to develop it) own it, own the tools to develop it, make decisions about it and benefit from their work for it. So, while it is a project, not a economic concept (So you can't say "Linux is communism". Communism is communism. Linux is Linux.), it certainly is based on a lot of the ideas that make up the foundation of communism.
The stock market used to be full of bears & bulls. Now it has penguins too :)
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
As for others actions indirectly, adversely affecting you? That's life. Get used to it because it is never going to change. We're not entitled or promised a safety net and anyone trying to give us one wants our freedom as the price. A bit here and another bit there; eventually it's gone.
Yeah, it always starts with regulating traffic and ends with concentration camps. There is absolutely nothing in between but one giant slippery slope.