[149917] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Hi speed trading - hi speed monitoring
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Graydon)
Thu Feb 16 20:09:32 2012
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:08:31 -1000
From: Paul Graydon <paul@paulgraydon.co.uk>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <5.1.0.14.2.20120216150028.00c2df78@efes.iucc.ac.il>
X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: paul@paulgraydon.co.uk
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 2/16/2012 3:03 AM, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
> Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire
> http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/high-speed-trading/
>
> "Below the 950-millisecond level, where computerized trading occurs so
> quickly that human traders can't even react, no fewer than 18,520
> crashes and spikes occurred."
>
> Anyone who has managed a network knows that when you look at your
> MRTG/Cacti graphs at 5min, 10min ,15min intervals - all looks well.
> Start looking at 1sec intervals and you will see spikes that hit 100%
> of capacity - even on networks running at 25% average utilization.
>
> I guess trading and networking do have many unseen similarities.
>
> -Hank
>
Anecdotally, I had an interview years ago for a small-ish futures
trading company based in London. The interviewer had to pause the
interview part way through whilst he investigated a 10ms latency spike
that the traders were noticing on a short point-to-point fiber link to
the London Stock Exchange. He commented that the traders were far
better at 'feeling' when an connection was showing even a trace of lag
compared to normal than anything he'd set up by way of monitoring (not
sure how good his monitoring was, though.)
Paul
