Google and Nasdaq Pursuing Nano-Second Precision In Network Time Protocol (nytimes.com) 203
"Computer scientists at Stanford University and Google have created technology that can track time down to 100 billionths of a second," reports The New York Times. "It could be just what Wall Street is looking for." Form the report: System engineers at Nasdaq, the New York-based stock exchange, recently began testing an algorithm and software that they hope can synchronize a giant network of computers with that nanosecond precision. They say they have built a prototype, and are in the process of deploying a bigger version. For an exchange like Nasdaq, such refinement is essential to accurately order the millions of stock trades that are placed on their computer systems every second. Ultimately, this is about money. With stock trading now dominated by computers that make buying and selling decisions and execute them with blazing speed, keeping that order also means protecting profits. So-called high frequency trading firms place trades in a fraction of a second, sometimes in a bet that they can move faster than bigger competitors.
wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
Uhm, no. The right way would be to artificially add a random delay of several minutes, with a reproducible generator based on the orders' hashes and some seed known in advance, to avoid foul play. The generator would also need to be based on all previous orders, to avoid gaming the system if the seed is "accidentally" leaked. Details are more complex but it's all well-researched stuff.
That would fix the high frequency trading abuse, which is nothing but pure theft, skimming a fraction from every bona-fide transaction.
Just one of so many simple solutions... if only the high frequency traders wouldn't collude with the rule makers...
Re:wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
The right way would be to artificially add a random delay of several minutes, with a reproducible generator based on the orders' hashes and some seed known in advance, to avoid foul play.
That would raise risk for market makers, increase transaction costs for small investors, and push even more big investors into off-shore dark pools [wikipedia.org].
Before proposing silly "solutions", could you please explain what problem are you trying to solve?
Re:wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
My gripe is that all this near-quantum physics in timekeeping doesn't really seem to be about fundamental economics, only about who or how gets to benefit from increasingly high speed trading. Too much of modern finance seems to be about how to manipulate the financial market itself to obtain profits vs. the actual fundamentals of business economics, i.e. the productivity of a given firm.
I guess I'm not that worried about off-shore dark pools. The US and its dollar remain a major force in world economics not just because of the US domestic economy and in spite of the occasionally ugly behavior of the US government. Why? Because the US regulatory and legal system is mostly fair and mostly transparent, and it's judgements and rules are backed by the full force of the United States.
No other nation can provide this and ultimately most capital will not choose to operate in an environment where the fairness and enforcement of contracts isn't guaranteed.
Re:wrong way (Score:4, Insightful)
Yah. There's good reasons why a minutes-long delay is not great, because we want things to settle out relatively quickly... but 2.5-25 milliseconds of fuzz on the order book would be just fine.
Re:wrong way (Score:5, Insightful)
Before proposing silly "solutions", could you please explain what problem are you trying to solve?
I don't know what problem he is trying to solve, but the problem that annoys me is front-running: listening for an order, then quickly buying the stock first (because you have faster connections), immediately turning around and selling it to the person who was going to buy it in the first place, but at a higher price. This does absolutely nothing to help the market as far as I can tell.
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If you want to stop front-running, make it illegal (if not already the case), and regularly audit trading systems. Front running and other abuse of insider knowledge are not specifically related to high frequency trading.
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Front running and other abuse of insider knowledge are not specifically related to high frequency trading.
High frequency trading mainly profits by front-running. There was a book about this, Flash Boys.
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High frequency trading mainly profits by front-running.
My point still stands. If you don't want front-running, then target front-running. It's not that hard. Just make sure that an order from any trader stays secret until it hits the exchange where it becomes visible in the order book for everyone at the same time.
If you just remove HFT, then front-running will still continue at a slower rate.
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Re:wrong way (Score:5, Interesting)
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How about just putting all orders received in a certain amount of time (say 30 seconds) in the same bin.
Because all the trades would be placed in the last microsecond of the time window.
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It wouldn't matter when in that quantum the order was placed, everyone would be working from the results of the last quantum.
Re:wrong way (Score:5, Informative)
It wouldn't matter when in that quantum the order was placed, everyone would be working from the results of the last quantum.
But having a long time window and waiting till the end means you can incorporate more information. If there is a big block trade in London, and you can transmit the information quickly to NYC, you can place your order in the last microsecond of the 30 second window and screw anyone dumb enough to have placed their order earlier ... so everyone will wait. So your "time window" will do nothing to discourage HFT.
What other effects will it have? It will increase transaction costs. High Frequency Traders are not investors, they are market makers. They find a willing buyer and a willing seller, arrange the transaction, and execute the trade. They make a profit on the spread between the buy price and the sell price. The problem is that once they locate the buyer and seller, they need to buy the stock from the seller first, then turn around and sell it to the buyer, but the buyer may have cancelled they transaction, or they may have already bought the stock from someone else, in which case the HFT is stuck with the stock and may have to sell it to someone else at a loss. If transactions are granulated to 30 second intervals, instead of say, millisecond intervals, then the risk of this happening is thirty thousand times higher , and the HFTs will insist on higher spreads, resulting in lower liquidity and higher transaction costs for both buyer and seller.
Since the introduction of high frequency trading, transaction costs have fallen considerably, saving plenty of people a lot of money. The only losers are the old market makers that used to have lucrative sweetheart deals with the exchanges. Those old market makers are now bankrupt and gone. Good riddance.
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The problem is that once they locate the buyer and seller, they need to buy the stock from the seller first, then turn around and sell it to the buyer
How is this a market maker? Why can't the buyer buy directly from the seller? Why do we need a middleman skimming off the transaction.
Why can't the stock exchange computer do the matching? Take all the bids in a 30 second period, don't show them to anyone, match them up, and then publish the results. Matching buys to sells is what computers are good at. It is what HFT computers are doing except they are also skimming in the process. It would make much more sense for the stock exchange itself to be the
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Why can't the buyer buy directly from the seller?
They can.
Why do we need a middleman skimming off the transaction.
We don't need them. But if a buyer is offering $4.56 for a share and a seller is willing to sell for $4.54, then somebody will jump in between. If the buyer/seller were willing to put in more effort they could have matched each other.
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We don't need them. But if a buyer is offering $4.56 for a share and a seller is willing to sell for $4.54, then somebody will jump in between. If the buyer/seller were willing to put in more effort they could have matched each other.
But this could all be automated by the exchange and given to the end user. I'm always happily surprised when my order is filled for less than my asking price. If you split the difference then both the buyer and seller benefits instead of a random third party. Arbitrage is useful in some instances for market efficiency but in HFT they aren't providing a service, they are scalping. It increases the trading cost for both the buyer and seller and benefits noone but the scalper.
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Why can't the buyer buy directly from the seller?
If you are a seller, how are you going to find a buyer? Craigslist?
Why can't the stock exchange computer do the matching?
The exchanges are made up of their members. The members are brokerages that execute trades on behalf of their clients. You, as an individual, cannot log into the NYSE computer and execute your trade anymore than you could have walked into the pit during the old paper-based days. So why can't you trade with a "member" instead of a HFTer? Because the members are the HFTers. For all practical purposes, the HFTers are the exchange.
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As long as the brokerages transfer your order directly to the market, there's no problem. If they use the early private knowledge of your trade to make a profit by front-running, that's illegal.
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If the HSTs can buy from A and sell to B, the market already exists with or without them. Why not just A sell to B and they split the difference rather than giving it away?
Perhaps it's time for the new market makers to go.
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Why not just A sell to B and they split the difference rather than giving it away?
Nothing is stopping A or B from doing just that, but if they don't take the effort to find the best price, somebody will trade both and make a small profit. That profit is a small price that A and B pay for the increased liquidity of the market.
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In other words, these "market makers" are just skimming and not so important at all.
As for liquidity, HSTs only buy is someone else is buying, no liquidity added.
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You only trade with a HF counterparty when they have the best price in the market at that point. So, by definition, that means that they've added liquidity. If they weren't there, you would have to wait longer or accept a worse price.
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By "longer", you mean up to 1 second. By "best price", you mean best price offered in that 0.1 ms. Wait another few ms and you'll see the better offer that the HST has already seen and started accepting,
You and that other party can both come out ahead if the HST isn't there and you wait a whole second.
The HSTs are a net loss to the economy.
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Wait another few ms and you'll see the better offer that the HST has already seen and started accepting,
Nope, that's called front running and it's illegal.
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Nope yourself. Front running is when they speculatively buy and then cancel before it can go through if they can't find a buyer. This is the closely related but currently legal practice of finding a buyer and a seller and jumping between them using their faster system colocated in the same place as the exchange itself.
HSTs don't hold stock. They don't offer liquidity. They don't "make" the market. They DO drive up costs and skim off the top.
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This is the closely related but currently legal practice of finding a buyer and a seller and jumping between them
On a single exchange, a matching buy/sell order will be traded immediately against each other as soon as the 2nd one appears. There is no time to jump between them, at least not based on publicly available data. Jumping between the trades is only possible if you have insider knowledge about future orders, but that's illegal.
It is legal and common to jump between buy/sell orders on different exchanges. You buy on one exchange, and sell on the other,
possibly using different currencies, in which case you can a
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It's a "service" sort of like convincing the street sweepers to skip the road in front of your auto shop (and the new construction across the street) so you can fix the inevitable flat tires.
Why do you think they're willing to spend megabucks to shave off fractions of a microsecond?
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Why do you think they're willing to spend megabucks to shave off fractions of a microsecond?
Because they make money doing it.
Why do you think Amazon spends megabucks to make their order picking more efficient ? More profit for them, but also allows them to compete better, which benefits the consumer in the end.
Same with arbitrage. Suppose you want to buy a stock in New York currently trading for $15.00, and for one brief second that same stock sells for $14.98 in Frankfurt. Do you want to spend your time with 5 open windows, fingers on the mouse, ready to cancel your order in New York, and quickly
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Why not just require a minimum hold time of, say, 30 seconds? That would pretty much put the HFTs out of business, and wouldn't significantly harm institutional and individual investors.
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A minimum hold of 30 seconds would hurt regular investors more than the small HFT margins.
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How would a 30 second minimum hold hurt regular investors?
I'm a regular investor
When I invest in stock I do it with the intention of holding it for days, weeks and months.
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While true, this also coincides with the timing of decimalization of stock prices. Which seems like a more likely cause.
HFTs don't "make markets", the "do arbitrage". The buyers and sellers both exist in the markets, but they hack their way in between them and skim billions. But I'll tell you what, let's try outlawing HFTs and if the world ends, we can re-legalize them.
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How about just putting all orders received in a certain amount of time (say 30 seconds) in the same bin.
Because all the trades would be placed in the last microsecond of the time window.
That works only if you know when the window ends. Just randomize its length.
Re:wrong way (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what I came here to say.
The economic point of share markets is to allow companies to raise capital for long term investments. If doing stuff on millisecond or microsecond timescales is profitable, then that profit is doing nothing productive and can only be leeching value from actual productive economic activity. The investors who really matter economically are those who buy and sell over timescales of months or years, who will not be hurt in the slightest by trades being on a 30 second clock tick. (I really don't know what the time quantum should be - probably somewhere between 1 second and 1 hour.)
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The HF traders *are* adding value. They are keeping all global markets in perfect sync. As an investor I can buy the same stock in New York or London, without having to worry about getting a bad deal. Prices in both markets will be exactly the same, because as soon as there appears a tiny difference, within a millisecond somebody will jump in with trades to level the markets again.
The cost for the regular investors is very small. HFT profit margins are tiny.
You need to convince voters that regulation works (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate Ronald Reagan with a passion. He and his ilk (Karl Rove & the like) rolled back 100 years of hard fought workers rights in a few decades and turned the working class against the very notion of organizing for their own benefit. They turned "Union" into a dirty word and convinced folks to scrap the whole system because of a few bad apples and some Mafia interference. They were masters at it too. I'm singling him out because he was the spokesman for that crap. Mr "Government's the problem, not the solution". But crap like this is part of a broader trend to weaken the power structures that created and allow the continued existence of a middle class.
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The first thing needed to make regulation work is to find a way to disallow those being regulated from bribing the regulators. Otherwise, you get Glass-Steagall removed and infinite copyright enacted. And only for this reason High Frequency Fraud still exists.
Glass Steagall got removed (Score:3)
Getting rid of the bribes wouldn't hurt, but if the end result is still guys like Ryan, McConnell and other "Small Government" right wingers running the show then nothing changes. We need to convince people government can work so they'll stop voting people into office whose goal is to break government.
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Government's the problem, not the solution". But crap like this is part of a broader trend
But government is the problem.
Not State Government, federal government. It's literally system-wide and needs to keep a light touch since it can affect, influence, damage, and destroy anything it gets near. It needs to be a coordination entity between states. It needs to make sure "everyone's telling the truth" as best they can, and the truth may change over time as we learn new things. (Eggs are good / bad / good / bad / I forgot what I said last.) And then again opinions may differ between states.
Wi
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take glass steagall. For 50 years it did a decent job of preventing the kinds of economic crashes we had in 2008
FWIW the counter-argument to this is that Canada never had Glass-Steagall, and they didn't suffer nearly the economic crash that America did.
As long as I'm here I would like to add that I don't care if banks crash, as long as they don't take me with them.
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That's the entire point of Glass-Stegal. To prevent the banks that invest in whatever crazy risks they want to take from being the same as the banks that care if they fail. Like literally make them different entities.
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... if only the high frequency traders wouldn't collude with the rule makers...
You nailed it right there. No system is going to work very well (and certainly not fairly) in which money buys everything, including changes to the rules. It's like a game of Monopoly in which, whenever you accumulate $50,000, you are allowed to change the rules of the game in your favour.
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It's all just enabling more bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
High frequency trading is entirely about subverting any remaining myth of the market or even less so-called "investing".
What absolutely needs to happen is a flat transaction tax on any and all transactions, obliterate this entire train wreck of a financial vehicle from the entire economic equation. Simply out of basic fairness, why do I get charged 10% sales tax when buying a candy bar but not if it's a share of Apple?
A simple 1% tax on transactions would overnight return the stock market to a system for investment rather than clever hacks to milk the real economy. If you don't think your stock is going to grow at least by 1%, you simply shouldn't buy it. An extremely modest 1% transaction tax would instill that sanity into the basic fabric of the marketplace.
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The other option would be to make all markets call markets with 5 second rounds... https://www.investopedia.com/t... [investopedia.com] Everyone places their trade orders, those that match at the end of 5 seconds clear. The whole thing starts again...
This puts a 5 second granularity on all transactions, they clear at specific 5 second intervals. There is absolutely no real value created by greater than 5 second resolution. It's not like the world needs you to trade your stock within the next 3 seconds and 5 seconds from now
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The other option would be to make all markets call markets with 5 second rounds...
That solves nothing. All trades would be placed in the last microsecond, and you would need still need extremely accurate time keeping to ensure an order doesn't slip into the wrong interval.
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Why would someone risk their order going into the wrong time slice? The time slice would be defined by when the central exchange timestamps it's arrival.
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Presumably bids would come labelled with the time slice they are intended to act in. Anything which comes late would be ignored, not applied to the next time slice (unless the bid's labels say this should happen.)
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Why add complexity?
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Why add complexity?
To help with sanity?
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You might think this is true, but it's not. The first thing is that you give priority to earlier bids/asks which changes the incentive structure, second off, you have a single point of arrival (a timestamper network border machine), third off, you specify in the law that the clock of that point of arrival must be within 1/2 second of correct relative to some UTC standard, but that so long as it is, the time of arrival at that location according to that clock is definitive. Third off you specify the granular
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Break ties on clearing orders arriving within the same 1ms timestamp granularity by simple random number generation (cryptographic, such as from /dev/urandom)
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And if the results of trades come back 1 second after the close off? Now all trades take a minimum of 1 second to resolve. How much advantage is there in the high speed trader having 1.001 second resolution of trades compared to the low speed trader's 1.5 to 6 second resolution?
Also, what information is the high speed trader trading off? If it is the results of previous trades (which I expect would normally be the case) then everyone has 5 seconds (or 4 seconds, if you delay release of trade results) in whi
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What are the odds the high speed trader will get value-changing knowledge that just happens to come along in the last few milliseconds before the clock tick?
Odds are pretty much 100%. Everything around the world is constantly changing. Somebody doing a trade in Europe will affect some stock in the USA.
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That solves nothing.
Add a Poisson random number of seconds to the trade (say, mean value of 20 seconds) and then process them in order of time placed + random number.
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My suggestion: Make bids non-retractable while trading is active, and only allow retractions after the bourse closes.
That should stop microtrading that attempts to game the system, while still allowing computerized bids.
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What absolutely needs to happen is a flat transaction tax on any and all transactions
Then we can all listen to the giant whoosing sound as hundreds of thousands of high paying financial industry jobs leave America for London, Singapore, and Shanghai, as yet another American industry is regulated out of existence.
I have a hard time imagining a stupider thing to tax than reallocation of capital. It will still happen, but mostly inside of private equity groups, outside of public view, and out of reach of the taxman. In 1990 PE was worth $30B. Today it is about $4.5 Trillion.
Re: It's all just enabling more bullshit (Score:2)
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They provide liquidity and arbitrage in exchange for a tiny fee.
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That'd be an enormous benefit for the society. Every penny that this high paying financial industry earns is a penny that actual investors don't get.
I have a hard time imagining a stupider thing to tax than reallocation of capital. It will still happen, but mostly inside of private equity groups, outside of public view, and out of reach of the taxman.
You can still watch and tax money coming into the group and leaving it. If they have a bad gentelman rule that this bit of profit belongs to member A and that bit to member B that's hidden from public view, I don't care -- they could play roulette for that money just the same. To get that profit, though, they need actions that are visible outside.
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That'd be an enormous benefit for the society. Every penny that this high paying financial industry earns is a penny that actual investors don't get.
Also, all those bright minds the HFT mafia employs would be freed for productive work. And the money saved from scalpers would pay for that work.
HFT is no different from ticket fraud: if a front runner buys all the tickets, both the venue and the patrons lose. And likewise, scalpers in both cases try to claim they provide benefits of some sort.
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HFT is no different from ticket fraud
Yes, there's a big difference.
Ticket fraud is an issue because the artists don't want market prices for their tickets. They want to make tickets lower than market price to satisfy the fans that can't afford expensive tickets.
In the stock market, the shares are already at market price, so there's no point in buying them early and reselling them for a profit because on average you won't get a profit. And trading based on insider knowledge is already illegal, whether you do it fast or slow.
Because they're the ruling class (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:It's all just enabling more bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
An extremely modest 1% transaction tax
A large low risk institutional investor like a retirement fund will average something like 3%/year. So every move would eat up 4 month's profit, that's extremely high and would slow liquidity to a crawl. If you wanted to kill HFT and reset the clock back to day traders then 0.01% would be enough, you could change horse every couple days but not buy and sell hundreds of times in a day like they do now.
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I'm going to pick in you because you're at +5, but my comment goes for pretty much anyone who has a "simple" method of frustrating HFTs:
Whatever you can think of will be scrutinised by rooms full of very bright, very specialised and very motivated people, who'll spend 8-10 hours per day, 5+ days per week thinking about how to work around whatever you propose. You may well find that the 'workaround' makes HFT way worse to you than whatever you think they're doing to you today.
Some examples of ways this could
So when the time server fails the market crashes? (Score:3)
So, in order to facilitate micro-trades, we're going to allow them to trade in terms of less than a second... which is disturbing all by itself when you think that even very fast internet destinations in the U.S. have latency on the order or 100ms or so. Even very slight congestion means that the financial exchanges have to simply trust the timestamps issued by the traders to get the prices and volume correct and cannot depend on the receive sequence.
There's no room for malicious action there at all, and as we all know, the U.S. has absolutely no outside actors interested in manipulating events inside the country for their own ends.
So ultimately, we're going to depend on some sort of time service run by Google and Nasdaq to validate those signatures. The problem there is that both those organizations have and will be aggressively targeted by bad apples the world over. TFA is a little light on the technical aspects of how, exactly, Google and/or Nasdaq is going to ensure that there's no forgery of timestamps. That service goes down... and Google and Nasdaq do have network problems from time to time... and suddenly all transactions are suspect? Heaven forfend that whatever algorithm used to synchronize and sign the transactions down to the nanosecond level is ever cracked. There's going to be a huge economic impetus for even very powerful countries to work on this. Imagine Chinese supercomputers manipulating American stock exchanges for their own benefit. I don't think that's too far fetched.
And we're not just depending on Google or Nasdaq, but on everyone who takes part in issuing and signing these timestamps. Wow, that's a huge amount of attack surface.
Re:So when the time server fails the market crashe (Score:4, Insightful)
But it would be such a shame, and a blow to the Working Man, if High Frequency Traders can't operate! Think of all the bots that would be put out of work, you insensitive clod!
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But it would be such a shame, and a blow to the Working Man, if High Frequency Traders can't operate!
You're trying to be funny but your humour by your lack of understanding about what HFT does. HFT is the reason your common man can buy and sell stocks at fixed set points accurately with low transaction costs.
Yes it would be a blow. I certainly don't want it to go back to the way it was years back where every buy and sell operation had to take into account the fees and potential delay costs associated with the transaction.
Signed: A Working Man ... well a procrastinating from Working Man.
Do evil (Score:2)
TSN (Score:3)
GPS time (Score:2)
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Getting precise time to better than a ns from GPS is not a trivial task (Hint: ionospheric weather routinely changes the naive answer by more than 10ns) but it is an achievable task. But at that level, everything matters. Is your antenna cable temperature-compensated? What's the temperature coefficient of your receiving hardware? Huygens seems to claim synchronization to the few 10s of ns, which is on the face of it a considerably easier proposition, but sounds interestingly challenging for commodity comput
Paper about the Huygens protocol (Score:5, Informative)
The New York Time article is mostly about how Nasdaq is eager to make more money.
For the technically minded, refer to the paper about the introduced Huygens protocol [usenix.org] for network time synchronization precise to the nanosecond.
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If I had any up votes you could have them all. Thanks for that
Femto Second (Score:2)
Femto-second market-destroying transactions are where it's at.
Correction (Score:2)
"Ultimately, this is about making money out of thin air."
FTFY
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No,it's not making money out of thin air. It's skimming money out of every transaction in the stock market. Taking money from every investor.
Easier solution: (Score:2)
Just add a time tax in which you must pay (1/X)% to sell the stock where X is the number of seconds since last buying the stock. This penalizes short-term purchases while long-term investments go unaffected. The stock market has shifted far from it's original purpose and should be fixed.
Openly Corrupt (Score:2)
The system is openly corrupt, they do not even try to hide it, yet people seem to not really care.
This will enable them to "out high frequency trade" other "high frequency traders" not able to process at their speed.
Instituting a required 1 day post processing of all orders in the order they were received would go a long way towards mitigating market volatility caused by this. This will only drive inflation up as those with the fastest systems can out game other systems, leaving the losing systems looking
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Instituting a required 1 day post processing of all orders
But the markets are privately run entities. And often various markets operate in different jurisdictions. So if one regulator imposed some artificial latency into their systems, traders would just jump ship and take their business to markets where there were no such restrictions.
Also, an increase in the precision of trade time stamps doesn't necessarily speed up trading. In fact, by ensuring that a networked, high precision time stamp was available across all the access points to the trading system, it wou
PTP/IEEE 1588? (Score:2)
Ordering the trades (Score:2)
When the morning bell finishes ringing the players day is done.
How fast can you spell "hyperbolic tax"? (Score:2)
So much of the news these days talks about inequality in societal wealth, collapse of traditional businesses and industries, and other gloomy socioeconomic news, even when "the economy" is running well. The idea of fast trading and its variations, day trading, high frequency trading, and their ilk are a vector of these inequities. Letting trades happen at nanosecond scale just amplifies the problems that make money for those who already have it while raising the barrier to ordinary citizens and investors.
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There is nothing inherently good or beneficial to society by having nanosecond trading
Yes, it's market efficiency.
You gain absolutely nothing by slower trades. It only means that there's an increased chance you're paying the wrong price, based on outdated information.
Few picosecond timing in use at smaller scale (Score:3)
At SLAC and other large accelerator complexes we need to synchronize systems as the few-picosecond level (sub-picosecond for specialized systems), over a few kilometers. For us we have a near speed-of-light beam to allow a clear definition of synchronization (but the synchronization is maintained without the beam), and are now also installing a system that measures the round-trip physical time delay. The latter of course depends critically on the exact cable routing.
For large scale (global) networks, its not obvious exactly what the goal is. Is the goal to ignore all cable delays? If so, I wonder how a computer's local time is certified to be synchronized at the nanosecond level - maybe some sort of GPS based synchronization where the computers position and GPS signal phase is used to determine time? (but what about the nanoseconds of GPS antenna cable?).
It seems like defining what is wanted may be trickier than doing the engineering.
1588 PTP (Score:5, Informative)
There is already a standard with nanosecond precision (or better).
It's called 1588 PTP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The irony is that while this improves NTP, "modern linux" uses "systemd-timesync" instead which kinda sorta knows how to get the time of day from one server with undefined tolerances, throwing away decades of work by intelligent people that went into making NTP what it is now.
Who cares, right. What did those nerds know about clocks and time anyway.
Re:Life in prison is a long time in nanoseconds (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding me? Woohoo, yet another reason to hate systemd.
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timesync is the best tool because it barely does what you will settle for. Okay. Or are you trying to say that a more precise time will somehow harm your desktops?
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timesync is the best tool because it barely does what you will settle for. Okay. Or are you trying to say that a more precise time will somehow harm your desktops?
Do you demand that your car is capable of half the speed of light? (Although you will never drive it at more than 70 mph because you are a law-abiding citizen).
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Re: Life in prison is a long time in nanoseconds (Score:4, Interesting)
ntp is designed to minimize time jumps, skewing by small amounts more often. timesyncd is just a reinvention of old timed, including unfounded beliefs in predictable network latency, and, yes, clock jumps where none are needed.
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You're accidentally correct in that PCs generally don't keep their RTC in sync (they have better time bases after booting up); other than that what a trainwreck of a comment. Yikes.
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I hope your weenie falls off.
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It's a parasitic strategy, that's why it seems like it is.