All a bit off topic but.. Milliseconds are now worth a great deal.
In 2010 one large investment bank valued 1 additional msec of latency between major financial markets at $120 Million per year. This is in turn driving a lot of new fibre projects along new, shorter great circle routes with the side effects of bringing long haul fibre to new places and driving down prices on established routes. These days the Telecomms industry trend is to quote RTT latency in msec to 2 decimal places Some recent projects of interest in this regard are. NY-London (landing in My end of Ireland, due our geographical advantage ;-) http://emeraldnetworks.com/ http://www.hiberniagfn.com/ Tokyo London (& NY) http://www.arcticfibre.com/routing-map.html Which will better the current best overland route http://www.bsonetwork.com/en/network/#2 Chicago - NY http://www.spreadnetworks.com/spread-networks/spread-solutions/dark-fiber-networks/overview Which in turn may yet be considerably bettered by Wireless Point to point (at of course much, much lower capacity and greater cost than Optical Fibre ) http://www.telecomramblings.com/2012/01/wireless-steps-up-to-the-low-latency-plate/ NY - Sao Paolo http://www.telecomramblings.com/2011/04/globenet-claims-low-latency-crown-between-northsouth-american-markets/ Quite apart from better optimised telecomms routes High frequency trading applications are moving to FPGA's for faster transaction speeds http://www.hftreview.com/pg/blog/mike/read/6868/fpga-the-next-wave-of-hft-technology http://www.highfrequencytraders.com/news-wire/1071/bittware-delivers-stateoftheart-fpga-boards-high-frequency-trading Like it or not the speed of light is becoming the upper limit here's a rather interesting paper that analyses the best locations for trading between markets based on the optimum low latency routes being built http://www.cfreer.org/papers/PhysRevE_82-056104.pdf Many of these routes are in the process of being built. regards Brendan On Fri, 2012-02-17 at 13:14 -0800, Rex wrote: > John, > > I agree with what you have said about the markets causing bad effects on > society because the focus is all short-term, but you are talking about > effects on the human time scale. HFT is orders of magnitude faster and > more insane. > > I saved two links from after the time of the 2010 "flash crash" of the > stock market. In addition to some analysis, they both show amazing > graphics of what the trading algorithms looked like on the actual market > activity. > > http://www.nanex.net/20100506/FlashCrashAnalysis_Intro.html > > http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/CCircleDay.html > > > > On 2/16/2012 2:45 PM, J. Forster wrote: > > Frankly, I think the rapidity of the financial system is not a good thing. > > It encourages the kind of speculation on Wall Street that more properly > > belongs in Las Vegas. > > > > It has bred the demands for ever increasing quarter-over-quarter results > > that result in cooking of the books and so on that deters long-range > > planning and thinkingt. > > > > YMMV, > > > > -John > > > > > _______________________________________________ > time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com > To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts > and follow the instructions there. -- 73 Brendan EI6IZ _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.