IMO, the obvious solution to this madness is to quantize stock trades; i.e. to only allow stock prices to change once every 10 seconds.
As long as transactions weren't announced until the end of the period, there wouldn't be any benefit from microsecond advantages. And then stock trades would begin to go back to being based on the value of the stock, not what a model says it will do in the next 2 seconds.
That would result in less efficient markets (which means higher spreads and more expensive transactions) and the market makers, who at present trade at high frequency, would capture more wealth than they do now.
In reality the model is a bit more complicated than that. The "market price" authored by an exchange is actually more of a mark-to-model calculation as a function of recent trades. Remember that a market exchange doesn't function like a store with customers buying product from a vendor at a fixed price. In oversimplified terms: In reality it's people selling at some price they want to sell at, and others buying at some price which they want to buy at. Orders are fulfilled by the best available match at the time.
The market participant who's able to collect, process and act on related sercurities' price discrepancies the fastest will always make money this way. Your example would simply raise the stakes- instead of continually slicing time into ever smaller intervals during which trading decisions can be made, there would be 8,640 global auction events, resulting in the exact same amount of arbitrage monies flowing into fewer hands.
Quantization is one possible way. Another would be transaction taxes. Whatever the mechanism chosen, the intention should be to maintain the financial system within a steady regime which optimises overall efficiency.
It also becoming a problem in semiconductor design: at 1GHz, light will only move 30cm between cycles. Thats not a lot if your memory isn't located close to your ALU.
The midpoint locations mentioned in this article are directly applicable to Seasteading. http://seasteading.org/
Many of these optimal trading locations are in the ocean. The spar buoy based structures designed by the Seasteading Institute are directly applicable, as they are about the only seagoing designs that are safe for permanent habitation. (Immune even to rogue waves.)
Eh, you don't really need habitation -- just a datacenter. It may be more cost-effective to design something specifically for this. At the minimum you're going to have to work out cooling and power anyway (hydroelectric and "just stick the heat sink in the ocean"?).
It's funny to think that some of the physicists who've left academia to join these companies might end up being paid a fortune to work on the exact same problems that they used to be paid a pittance to work on!
There are a lot of quant funds that were started by professors. They hire a lot of PhDs in Math and Physics. And yes, a PhD in Math can make a lot of money if you end up working at a trading firm.
It's sad to see fast fiber optics (and the expertise that goes into building and running it) wasted on gaming the system in this way when a change in the rules would remove the loophole giving people incentive to do it.
It's not really a loophole. It's a fundamental property of the universe.
Consider currencies for example. Say someone in Tokyo was selling USDJPY at 84 and this was the best price anywhere in the world, then naturally anyone buying would want to buy from them. But the guy in London who wants to buy won't see the price of 84 until 90ms later, so he ends up buying from someone in New York at a worst price.
So the guy in London got a worse price and the guy in Tokyo didn't get a sale. Despite the fact that in an ideal world they would have been matched together, the fundamental laws of the universe conspire against them.
Essentially what ends up happening is that for any one currency you end up with a bunch of local market (NY, Tokyo, Singapore, London) all of which have slightly different prices from each other, which isn't a great situation to be in. Reducing latency won't make this problem go away, but it helps flatten out the markets and ensures that people get the best price globally (as opposed to just locally) wherever possible.
I guess the article is optimistic in that sense. If you can engineer fiber that's 74% of c, or better yet, bore one of your mirror holes directly through the center of the earth, between nyc and shanghai, or something even crazier, you can make a lot of money.
Light slows down in waveguides too. A heuristic explanation is that as it travels down the guide, it's also bouncing off the sides, and so effectively going at an angle.
Most exchanges that trade "arbitragable" instruments are in the same timezone and geographic location (NY-Chicago is one exception). There is no point having the optimal colo between TSE and NYSE because they have no overlapping hours nor do they have anything that trades on both and is fungible.
This research is patently academic. This is what happens when two pointy heads in ivory tower with zero empirical trading experience dream up something. Then all geeks go ga-ga talking about fiber optics and sea steading and other bs.
"There is no point having the optimal colo between TSE and NYSE because they have no overlapping hours nor do they have anything that trades on both and is fungible."
There is tremendous overlap amongst various stock exchanges, OTC's, dark pools (12% of US trading), and of course there's Forex which is 24/7.
Maybe we could use quantum entanglement devices to allow for faster trades? Since the speed of light in the medium is 0.66c you could probably get as close to c as possible.
There's no known way to transfer information faster than the speed of light (and if there were, there are some relativistic tricks you can play to actually send information backwards in time).
[+] [-] powera|15 years ago|reply
As long as transactions weren't announced until the end of the period, there wouldn't be any benefit from microsecond advantages. And then stock trades would begin to go back to being based on the value of the stock, not what a model says it will do in the next 2 seconds.
[+] [-] falsestprophet|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azim|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashika|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] motters|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jallmann|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|15 years ago|reply
Many of these optimal trading locations are in the ocean. The spar buoy based structures designed by the Seasteading Institute are directly applicable, as they are about the only seagoing designs that are safe for permanent habitation. (Immune even to rogue waves.)
[+] [-] Locke1689|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrew1|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidamcclain|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionysiac|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skybrian|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|15 years ago|reply
Consider currencies for example. Say someone in Tokyo was selling USDJPY at 84 and this was the best price anywhere in the world, then naturally anyone buying would want to buy from them. But the guy in London who wants to buy won't see the price of 84 until 90ms later, so he ends up buying from someone in New York at a worst price.
So the guy in London got a worse price and the guy in Tokyo didn't get a sale. Despite the fact that in an ideal world they would have been matched together, the fundamental laws of the universe conspire against them.
Essentially what ends up happening is that for any one currency you end up with a bunch of local market (NY, Tokyo, Singapore, London) all of which have slightly different prices from each other, which isn't a great situation to be in. Reducing latency won't make this problem go away, but it helps flatten out the markets and ensures that people get the best price globally (as opposed to just locally) wherever possible.
[+] [-] kiba|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iwr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashika|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnoise|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seva|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arbitage12|15 years ago|reply
This research is patently academic. This is what happens when two pointy heads in ivory tower with zero empirical trading experience dream up something. Then all geeks go ga-ga talking about fiber optics and sea steading and other bs.
[+] [-] johnglasgow|15 years ago|reply
There is tremendous overlap amongst various stock exchanges, OTC's, dark pools (12% of US trading), and of course there's Forex which is 24/7.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crenelle|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnglasgow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lrm242|15 years ago|reply