Re: OT: high frequency trading

Keegan,
I won't get into a argument with you about this. Do you work for a financial
services company that does trading? Trading decisions made by humans?
Really? Have you been to the CME or NASDAQ recently? How many human traders
do you see in the pits vs say 5 or 10 years ago?

All I will say is that all that I mentioned is not technology for technology
sake. Financial services companies are making real money based on trading
strategy and low latency. Nobody at least not in the financial world would
spend money just for technology sake. Its spent if it gives you an edge and
bottom-line, helps you win in the market space. I can tell you first hand,
low latency technologies and designs have won, and won big in the market
place for us and quite frankly many other firms. This is not a gimmick of
"technology for technology sake".

But thats why I referenced my emails with, this only relates to Financial
services companies or High Computing environments. Most network services are
unconcerned with this level of latencies.

Anyway, I'm done talking about it. Thought I'd might add to a conversation I
know very well, and is the driver of articles like the one Network World
wrote in January or about 10Gb switches. Its the driver on why Cisco is
coming out with a lower latent chipset for the Nexus platform later on this
year.

This is real stuff happening in the network engineering world for whomever
is working or will work in Financial services or trading environments.

On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 12:37 PM, <Keegan.Holley_at_sungard.com> wrote:

>
> I'm still not convinced that a trading application can serve up trades that
> fast. Also, many of the trading decisions are made by humans and we haven't
> even reached the "seconds" world. Infiniband is just another gadget as is
> 10G and the inevitable 100G. A normal bus usually operates at about 8-10G
> anyway. You're still thinking in terms of communication between nodes.
> What about actually generating and analyzing data? Storing it? Backing it
> up? We are of course assuming that the actual exchange can receive and
> process all this data at the speed at which it is chucked at them without
> causing bottlenecks. We're also assuming that they care. I'm not saying
> that it's impossible, but I would just like to see a real world comparison
> done that shows a 2ms trading house vs. a 10ms trading house in the same
> colo. Or even a trading house that saw real world improvements (like those
> measured in dollars) after lowering their latency to an exchange. My gut
> says that most of this is technology for it's own sake.
>
>
> From: Abdul <rslab007_at_gmail.com> To: Keegan.Holley_at_sungard.com Cc: Nahskur
> Udniraht <expertinternetwork_at_gmail.com>, Anthony Bonilla <
> anthonybonilla.ccie_at_gmail.com>, "ccielab_at_groupstudy.com" <
> ccielab_at_groupstudy.com>, Gregory Gombas <ggombas_at_gmail.com>, "Joseph L.
> Brunner" <joe_at_affirmedsystems.com>, nobody_at_groupstudy.com Date: 02/13/2010
> 12:23 PM
> Subject: Re: OT: high frequency trading Sent by: <nobody_at_groupstudy.com>
> ------------------------------
>
>
>
> Keegan,
> You may a great point. And frankly your point is Cisco's argument why the
> Nexus platform should still be considered for the High Frequency/Low
> Latency
> trading. So you right, .. once you've squeezed all the microseconds out of
> the switch, and your "race to 0" is complete, it makes no sence to be
> 2microseconds better from one switch to another when the application still
> adds 1millisecond of latency (more like a couple of milliseconds or even a
> second).
>
> But trading strategies out there are addressing that with
> numerous optimization techniques on the software & even server architecture
> side. Finally this is where if you application is still that slow..
> Infiniband? Hummm... Enough said.
>
> Finally.. be advised.. most of this "advantage" on the latency side is
> really played in the 10Gb arena. How many companies are serving up 10Gb of
> data for consumption? Yeah, yeah, heard the serialization effect between
> 10Gb and 1Gb but seriously if your only pushing 1Gb of date on a 10Gb nic,
> how much latency are you truly saving to the application?
>
> Great topic, but really only Financial Services and High
> computing environments are that concerned with shaving off microseconds.
> For
> the rest of the world, if you get your network to be milliseconds faster,
> your the man. Cause their applications are still running in the seconds
> world. :-)
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 11:48 AM, <Keegan.Holley_at_sungard.com> wrote:
>
> > Can you're software really move that fast? I understand the ability to
> > move data faster and oversubscription rates. I simply have doubts that
> > this translates to real world results.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > From:
> > Nahskur Udniraht <expertinternetwork_at_gmail.com>
> > To:
> > Keegan.Holley_at_sungard.com
> > Cc:
> > "Joseph L. Brunner" <joe_at_affirmedsystems.com>, Anthony Bonilla
> > <anthonybonilla.ccie_at_gmail.com>, "ccielab_at_groupstudy.com"
> > <ccielab_at_groupstudy.com>, Gregory Gombas <ggombas_at_gmail.com>,
> > nobody_at_groupstudy.com
> > Date:
> > 02/13/2010 08:29 AM
> > Subject:
> > Re: OT: high frequency trading
> > Sent by:
> > <nobody_at_groupstudy.com>
> >
> >
> >
> > network comes to play after you break 1 millisecond barrier ...
> >
> > we are using 4948 most of the time ...
> >
> > On Sat, Feb 13, 2010 at 6:50 PM, <Keegan.Holley_at_sungard.com> wrote:
> >
> > > This has been done and re-done over and over. You can colo at the
> > > exchange itself or there are probably a wealth of carrier hotels within
> > > 10ms of it. The bottleneck is almost always going to be the software
> > > though. I haven't actually seen studies on this, but off the top of my
> > > head I'm curious about the benefit of lowering latency from 15ms to say
> > 2
> > > or 3. The software can take 1 or 2 full seconds or more to do it's DB
> > > calls and actually use the connection.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > From:
> > > "Joseph L. Brunner" <joe_at_affirmedsystems.com>
> > > To:
> > > Gregory Gombas <ggombas_at_gmail.com>, Anthony Bonilla
> > > <anthonybonilla.ccie_at_gmail.com>
> > > Cc:
> > > "ccielab_at_groupstudy.com" <ccielab_at_groupstudy.com>
> > > Date:
> > > 02/12/2010 10:54 AM
> > > Subject:
> > > RE: OT: high frequency trading
> > > Sent by:
> > > <nobody_at_groupstudy.com>
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Actually most shops send the orders to different exchanges and black
> > books
> > > and of course arbitrage between the price differences they can exploit.
> > > The can often find liquidity before anyone else knows it exists, and
> > they
> > > can send orders our for a very short time, of course pulling them if
> > they
> > > don't get the price they want...
> > >
> > > It's kind of a nice study to work with these guys- they do eat the
> > slower
> > > players lunch (that may be software not just location based slowness).
> > >
> > > Pretty much all the major players are already at the exchanges and
> > > therefore you have to do it.
> > >
> > > -Joe
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: nobody_at_groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody_at_groupstudy.com<nobody_at_groupstudy.com>]
> On Behalf Of
> > > Gregory Gombas
> > > Sent: Friday, February 12, 2010 9:17 AM
> > > To: Anthony Bonilla
> > > Cc: ccielab_at_groupstudy.com
> > > Subject: Re: OT: high frequency trading
> > >
> > > Tell them it won't matter anyway because whatever slight edge they
> > > will get over their competitor by collocating at the exchange will
> > > disappear once their competitor does the same :-)
> > >
> > > On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 10:23 PM, Anthony Bonilla
> > > <anthonybonilla.ccie_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > Hi all, I am back again. Have a question regarding high frequency
> > > trading.
> > > > We are planning on collocating at an exchange for trading and are
> > > looking
> > > > for doing lowest latency possible. I wanted to see if anyone else is
> > > doing
> > > > this and if there are any recommendations. I am currently thinking
> > > about
> > > > 4900M and nexus 5k (layer 2) but am interested in seeing what others
> > > have
> > > > done and whether there are any best practices from cisco to ensure
> > that
> > > we
> > > > achive lowest latency. TIA.
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Blogs and organic groups at http://www.ccie.net
> > > >
> > > >
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> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Nahskur Udniraht
> > expertinetwork.blogspot.com
> >
> >
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Received on Sat Feb 13 2010 - 13:09:30 ART