Aussie Telco Lays New Fiber For Microsecond Trading Boost
schliz writes "Australian data center and telecommunications provider Vocus has installed two new underwater fiber links across the Sydney Harbor in a bid for the lowest connection latency between the city's financial district and the Australian Securities Exchange's recently opened data center, north of the CBD. The project involved 1.6 kilometers of custom, 312-core single-mode optical fiber cable, and was expected to deliver a route that is 400 meters shorter than existing links. RTFA for pretty installation photos."
I have a friend who is a developer for a hedge fund where they pay him and a few others north of $250k each per year (it is NYC) to try and and shave milliseconds off transactions. They spend big bucks trying anything to reduce a transaction time from 4ms to 3ms or lower.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This is a privately owned cable.
Not really. Stock-exchanges should either just enforce once-a-minute matching (with lottery determining which trades to fulfill if there's several takers), or they should just set some minimal fee for every non-filled order which stands for less than a minute, 1% of the order-value would be plenty, probably even 0.1% of the order-value would be enough to stop HFT dead.
They're taking steps, some of them, but it's baby-steps. For example the Norwegian stock-exchange is adding a $0.01 fee for every trade - for those traders who file more than 70 orders for every *one* that goes trough, only orders which are withdrawn before 1 second has passed, are counted.
This is an *extremely* timid step. Make it $1, one in ten, and 1 minute rather than 1 second, and we're talking.