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."

Re:Random delay legislation

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Aussies proud of new fiber

[__Reason__]

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"!

Re:High-Frequency Trading

[guttentag]

The point is that the banks are playing a custom video game against each other with taxpayer money (assuming that if they screw up badly enough the government will bail them out) instead of points. Any advantages (in other scenarios these would be known as "cheats") they can get earn them real money in this game.

Eventually it's going to get to the point where they can't get any faster. Then they will have to resort to some variant of the Konami code [wikipedia.org] to keep one-upping each other. You know, push the price Up, push the price Up, Short, Short, move your investment to the ticker symbol to the Left on the board, then the Right, Left again, then Right again, Bundle a bunch of securities together then Auction the pieces off. Oh wait, they already did that. Damn those guys are fast!