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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."
Is there anything positive about high-frequency trading (which I assume is the reason for this link)? It seems HFT it is really only benefitting large banks and introducing a whole lot of stability problems in stock markets. And what exactly is the economical purpose of investing your capital in a company for a few milliseconds?
CAPTCHA: breakage
The speed of the link isn't due to the shorter length but bypassing all the other parties along the line and dedicated bandwidth. Bypass the queue.
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.
From the article:
“It’s great to have [multiple paths], so if something did happen to the Harbour Tunnel, we’d be one of the carriers with capacity,” Spenceley told iTnews.
“It’s a one-in-a-million-year event but you just have to have it.”
But for nuclear power plants it's ok to only plan for 1 in 10'000 year tsunamis or so. But god forbid that trading link went down.
This is a privately owned cable.
Microsecond trading should be downright illegal. Instead of market fluctuations leading towards a stable price, market fluctuations are used to pump money out of the real economy into the virtual one. Nothing of value is added by such trade. Only real people are prevented from adding any value.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
It is time to make a global law. Every transaction should be subjected to a randomised delay between 1 and 2 seconds . Problem solved, smart people can start doing something useful again.
It's not just disappearing down a black hole, it's part of the same economy as the rest of us.
Actually, that's not true anymore. Take a look at how much consumer goods people buy all the time. Now think for a while how many people actually make all those consumer goods and where. The thing is, it takes just a few thousand people to manufacture enough units of the same goods for the whole world.
So yes, from our point of view, money is disappearing down a black hole. The black hole just contains a significant part of the world economy (in terms of money, not people). Some money leaks back from the black hole through employee wages but those money leaks are not as evenly distributed across the world as money suction. Do you still think that some areas can't be sucked dry?
Fiber for stock trading is considered good by all the government departments that had to OK this. But according to (one half of) our government, fiber is a total waste for everyone else in the country, and we should never need more then the mobile (cell phone) networks can provide...
The dichotomy is impressive.
One guy on (IIRC) boing boing had a great suggestion about neutrinos. We can now transmit and recieve neutrinos and fire them directly through the Earth. If used to carry data, latency could be reduced by 3.14 (pi). A latency improvement of that magnitude would be important to some people, particularly between America and Europe.
But unfortunately, such a system could not send information back in time.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Sigh. Like the new transatlantic cable for high speed trading, another project created solely to shave off time on automatic trades and thus print money. Does this do anything? Am I the only one who sees this as driving up transaction costs because you have "investors" who really don't invest in companies trying to take almost microscopic profit automatically? Where is the benefit to the financial system? What about the economy? I wonder how long people would stand for an extra layer being added to some other industry that does nothing but get paid for doing nothing?
These trades are like taxes, but they don't pay for any roads, health care, retirement, of national defense. They just make a few DBs who don't manufacture or invent anything rich. It will never happen, but I would like some politicians to get into an ethical debate on the socioeconomic benefits of this type of activity. Seriously. How defensible is this type of activity under Western Judeo-Christian ethical frameworks? Most American jurists publicly support natural law, at least while going through public confirmation hearings, so where exactly does this fit?
Make love, not reality television.
Definitely. Everyone who really cares about low latency is renting rack space colocated with the stock exchange at the site in Gore Hill. There is no point shaving 400m off the link to the CBD, as it will still be far poorer latency than running colocated. There's nothing in the CBD of significance that would make you want to run an application there vs in the colo.
. . . does that add more latency to the line? Can you measure actual versus expected latency to see if your undersea lines have been tapped?
No - you can use something like a 1:99 optical splitter so they'll barely notice the signal drop, and will add about 5mm of optical fiber into the line, so they won't notice any additional latency (less than 20 picoseconds). Then run your 1% signal into an optical amplifier, say an EDFA, and snoop to your hearts content.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
"Trickle down" is fine in theory. In practice, the smart new money goes where the smart old money went: appreciating assets like old art, old land, old bricks and mortar.
That's mostly a closed loop where the same goods go round and round for higher and higher prices. People rarely "cash out" and spend the profits on new things that drive demand.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Any high frequency trader HFT, market marker, derivatives trader etc.... worth it's salt has already co-located with the ALC (ASX/SFE) data center in gore hill, if you are not interested in low latency trading with the ASX then why would you bother paying the extra $$$ for these lines when you can get a fiber line anywhere in sydney for $2K a month from pipe/TPG networks.
It said "windows 98 or better" so I installed Linux
Strewth! This new cable sounds Bonza! Betcha it'll get that financial data across the drink faster than you can say "A dingo ate my baby"!
This is really for connecting the two exchanges in Sydney, the ASX and Chi-X. Plenty of stocks trade on both exchanges so the advantages to knowing sooner what is happening on the other exchange are obvious.
If only it were true, but it ends up going into the bank accounts of the traders, who use it not to purchase goods and services but hoard it as a way of keeping score. A lot of the financial industry is only interested in competition on who can collect the most dollars.
In the UK, several banks spent millions building hugely fast data centres to allow high speed trading. Then one enterprising firm rented some rooms in the same building as the London Stock Exchange and essentially dropped a cable down through the ceiling from their servers to the Exchange servers. Made quite a bit of difference...
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Capitalism doesn't force innovation. If it did, we'd be out innovating everyone in the world.. we're not. We have a bunch of corporations trying to buy the system of regulations it wants to shut down the innovations of others. We have other corporations using everything they can do eliminate competition, not through innovating new items, but by trying to block the use of old or common items through a disaster of a patent system.
Need forces innovation. If someone needs something that doesn't exist, guess what happens....
Soviet Russia wasn't capitalist, but they sure as hell got into space before us. That took innovation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Not really. Chi-X is at Global Switch in Pyrmont and there are already dedicated fibre links to the ASX colo at Gore Hill from there. This link appears to run to the CBD. Besides, there's very little volume on Chi-X so no-one trades there. It's a bit of a catch 22 - no volume there, so no-one trades there, so there's no volume. I reckon it's just used for re-reporting negotiated trades as it's cheaper than reporting on ASX. There definitely isn't enough going on there to make any money out of arbitrage or for executing hedges or anything like that.
First of all, I seriously doubt that you want to remove all regulations on trading; you probably draw some of your confidence in the market from those regulations.
That being said, high-frequency trading is damaging to the economy, by any reasonable, non-religious measure. Profit from HFT is based entirely on the speed of one's computer; it has nothing to do with the information available to investors, it has nothing to do with optimizing your trading strategy (mixed strategies take too long to compute anyway -- HFT is based on executing a suboptimal strategy too quickly for anyone with a theoretically better strategy to compete), and it is not a useful form of arbitrage. HFT turns futures markets into negative sum games for investors who are looking to hedge risks and even for speculators, siphoning money away from people who are using futures contracts in productive ways and filling the pockets of people who are doing nothing productive.
HFT firms are parasites, nothing more. The sooner we get rid of them, the better.
Palm trees and 8
Speed of light in air is greater than in an optical fibre (glass) by a significant margin. Refractive index of dry air ~1, for glass ~1.5. Why can't they use a directed radio link, and use the fibre only as backup. Is it slower to modulate radio signals?
400m is 1.3 ns (nano-seconds), 2.6 ns for round trip. If that kind of time interval is make or break, then I wonder why they're still talking about microsecond trading!
That's not why it's a waste of cash. It's a waste of cash because it's not going to be doing anything productive. It's simply going to allow some robot to make a trade six tenths of a millisecond faster. Whoopdy-doo. It's not going to help anyone, it's not going to make progress for anything, it's not going to do anything useful other than help make some already rich guys a fraction richer.
Markets are feedback control systems
I'm an electronics engineer and have had postgraduate courses on this. Any delay introduced in the feedback loop will tend to destabilize the system. HFT works fine, it provides liquidity to the market, it benefits everyone.
BTW, I also derive most of my income today from trading stocks, not in a bank, but my own savings, trading from home. I'm perfectly satisfied with the way the system works.
People who hate the market suffer from the same problem as those who hate people from a different race. It's prejudice caused by ignorance.
To assume that traders are greedy people who only want to steal from you is the same as some Alabaman who believes blacks are lazy and stupid men who only want to rape white girls with their huge penises.
The free market is a very positive force that benefits everyone. Look at North Korea for what will happen when there's no free market. Look at other third world countries to see what happens when markets are small and primitive.
HFT is necessary because prices are not continuous amounts, they are broken at $0.01 intervals. To see how bad this is, imagine a share with a price in the single-digits cent range. This company really exists. If you could buy it at $0.01 you would have the perfect deal, it cannot go any lower and if it goes up you win at least 100%. According to my broker page, which I cannot link here, right now there are bids to buy 7882 million TecToy shares at $0.01.
One cent is an extreme case, but this problem appears at any price. Prices are not an analog value, they are subject to effects coming from the gaps between the cents. HFT is a way to filter some of these problems through dithering. This is the same principle that lets printers print gray scales with black ink, they print many very small black dots and varying the interval between the dots lets it show any value of gray.