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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
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.
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!
There was a good talk at Defcon about those networks. They can't afford to run any security, even as an afterthought and they are completely open with nothing but a dust-thin layer of obscurity covering them. All in the name of the dollar.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Every transaction should be subjected to a randomised delay between 1 and 2 seconds . Problem solved, smart people can start doing something useful again.
Yeah like modelling the random number generator.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Yup. In the US it sounds like about 1 out of every 3 dollars in profit made is made by the financial services sector. That is a sector that basically does nothing but move money from point A to point B - they're the middle-men of the economy.
Don't get me wrong, efficient allocation of capital is valuable. However, can it really be said to be efficient if it consumes a full third of the entire US economy?
I think the current recession proves that it is misguided to think it is all down to one sector of the economy.
The current recession was effectively created by the financial sector, otherwise it'd be over already. What they did was they leveraged some crappy loans into a global crisis and then they insured themselves by betting against those loans. The biggest heist in history was the fact that bailing out the insurance companies was basically the same as bailing out the institution who'd caused everything.
Atm. you cannot trust the financial sector, that's why we're still in this mess.