WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]
top | item 23596037

Companies Pitch Shortwave Radio to Shave Milliseconds Off Trades

46 points| lightlyused | 5 years ago |bloomberg.com | reply

81 comments

order
[+] cameldrv|5 years ago|reply
This has been going on for several years at least. These are some pretty good articles from some amateur sleuths:

https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-tr...

https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/06/07/shortwave-tr...

https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/shortwave-tr...

https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/shortwave-tr...

[+] sargun|5 years ago|reply
I remain convinced that this is Starlink's short-term customer if their promises are true. They are doing transmission via optical as the crow flies. If they're doing O-O, or even low latency O-E-O, they can beat transatlantic fiber. For HFT houses, that's potentially a major edge.
[+] modeless|5 years ago|reply
Starlink latency would be worse than shortwave. The advantage would be bandwidth, but I doubt that high bandwidth is really helpful for this application, especially if you have to give up a tiny bit of latency for it. After all, you can already have all the bandwidth you want with only slightly higher latency.
[+] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
What happens in the global market if a single person consistently has a timing advantage over every other participant(because the barrier to building a global satellite network is too high/costly for anyone else)? Could Elon come to own the entire market, or is there some limit to the powers of arbitrage?
[+] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Starlink might get as much for denying access to specific other parties as for selling access in the first place.
[+] sgt101|5 years ago|reply
If I was regulating the markets I would introduce a random ~100ms delay into all transactions.
[+] VMG|5 years ago|reply
The company who has the best latency would still beat the competitors.
[+] bzb3|5 years ago|reply
The way it is now the company that's invested the most in communications and is better located wins. Meritocracy is good.
[+] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
It's pretty hard to hide a yagi-uda antenna capable of transoceanic distance communications. The data rates are MUCH lower than what's possible by fiber and microwave, as pointed out in the article.
[+] ncmncm|5 years ago|reply
Now they need a bidding market to determine who gets to choose whether to send a 1 or 0 in the next available slot.

And another market for which bits to jam and prevent either value from getting through.

[+] musicale|5 years ago|reply
It's weird that we've set up a stock market for machines rather than humans, where ever-faster bots interpose themselves between slightly slower bots, all the way up to the original buyer and seller, who are probably bots as well.
[+] rvense|5 years ago|reply
This all sounds so perverse to me. There are so many obviously brilliant people working on these things. Why aren't they doing something productive with their time? Fighting climate change, educating uneducated, feeding the unfed. All the energy and rare and bloody minerals that are being put into these radios, all the drinking water that will be forever tainted after having been used to produce the semiconductors needed for all this... was it really the best place to use it? To make the roulette wheel run a little faster? I don't understand it.
[+] missedthecue|5 years ago|reply
The machines help humans. The bid/ask spread on a $100 share in 1970 as $5. Now it's $0.003 cents and it will continue to narrow, saving you and I money.
[+] logicchains|5 years ago|reply
The bots don't take profit, the humans do. They just use bots because bots can help them better achive what they need, much like we may prefer to use a browser to fetch information from the internet rather than physically going down to a library.
[+] im3w1l|5 years ago|reply
So if glass slows the signal down, would it be possible to use a hollow fiber?
[+] Junk_Collector|5 years ago|reply
Yes, that would commonly be called circular wavegguide. The issue with using waveguide is that it is very expensive to run over distances. WR-75 flexible waveguide, for instance, costs roughly $1k/ft.
[+] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
Not with anywhere nearly as good as the 0.28db/km attenuation achieved on modern singlemode 9/125 fiber.
[+] H8crilA|5 years ago|reply
Or a much thicker fiber with conductive coating while sending microwaves through it? Shorter microwaves should be transmissible via a few mm wide conductive pipe.