[155414] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: raging bulls
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ryan Malayter)
Wed Aug 8 10:47:52 2012
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2012 09:20:23 -0500
From: Ryan Malayter <malayter@gmail.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
"Naslund, Steve" <SNaslund () medline com> wrote:
> It seems to me that all the markets have been doing this the wrong way.
> Would it now be more fair to use some kind of signed timestamp and
> process all transactions in the order that they originated? Perhaps
> each trade could have a signed GPS tag with the absolute time on it. It
> would keep everyone's trades in order no matter how latent their
> connection to the market was. All you would have to do is introduce a
> couple of seconds delay to account for the longest circuit and then take
> them in order. They could certainly use less expensive connections and
> ensure that international traders get a fair shake.
I can't see any incentive for any *influential* party involved (the
big firms or the exchanges) to make the process "fair". The exchange
gets more money for low-latency network access and expensive
co-location. The moneyed firms with HFT capability of course do not
want anyone else to have their advantage. Even governments don't want
long-distance traders to have "fair" access, as that reduces the
advantage of local tax-paying firms, thereby reducing tax revenue,
jobs, etc.
HFT is not just a US phenomenon; all major exchanges have basically
the same sort of phenomenon. So UK-based trading firms with HFT setups
very close to the FTSE exchanges have advantage over US-based firms
that don't have HFT setups in London.
--
RPM
