
Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades - gscott
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/01/goldman-spending-100-million-to-shave-milliseconds-off-stock-trades.html
======
1e-9
Markets around the world are determining prices on a massive variety of
instruments that derive value from the current and future value of products
such as currencies, interest rates, equities, grains, livestock, metals, oil,
gasoline, natural gas, and electricity. These prices allow us to prioritize
resources, make fair transactions, and manage risk (i.e. buy insurance on the
value of critical products so that we can plan and invest more effectively).
The value of all these instruments are related to one another, as well as to
realtime world events, in complex ways that no one entity has a perfect view
of. Consequently, markets work by polling the expertise of many different
parties who all understand a piece of how things should be valued. This
results in millions, if not billions, of interconnected price-discovery
feedback loops. The markets are kind of like a massive, distributed, realtime,
ensemble, recursive predictor that performs much better than any one of its
individual component algorithms could. The reason why shaving a few
milliseconds (or even microseconds) can be beneficial is because the price
discovery feedback loops get faster, which allows the system to determine a
giant pricing vector that is more self-consistent, stable, and beneficial to
the economy. It's similar to how increasing the sample rate of a feedback
control system improves performance and stability. Providers of such benefits
to the markets get rewarded through profit.

~~~
ypcx
The theory sounds great. But why then, our streets are lined with homeless,
and our nations are stricken with poverty? Could it be that the only real aim
and motivation of market traders is to earn money? One day, maybe.... when
these are replaced with DAOs on the blockchain. But until then it's the Wolf
of Wall Street.

~~~
JDiculous
Because having homeless people lining our streets on our commutes to/from our
jobs is a daily reminder that if we don't work hard enough to increase
corporate profits, then our bosses might lay us off and we'll end up like
them.

That or moral apathy. At some point in the 80s we decided that markets driven
by business profits should dictate every aspect of society.

I imagine 100 years from now they'll look back at today in disgust.

~~~
assblaster
100 years after Communism burst on the scene, we currently look at that
development with disgust.

Right now most people have access to abundant food, cellphone in every pocket,
access to a wealth of information, access to transportation, incredible
medical advances.

I can't imagine that the progress we've made would be scorned. Like other
market driven forces, bad players will not be rewarded as information about
them increases.

However, if information is not increased because of something like a company
buying a newspaper so investigative threats can be used against politicians to
avoid information gathering, then we have problems. This is more crony
capitalism than just capitalism.

~~~
annabellish
"What we have now is the bad kind of capitalism! There's a different, good
kind of capitalism which in theory does all these great things!" is
essentially the "communism works great in theory" argument.

100%, both systems are great theories. However, the last few hundred years of
actually trying to implement capitalism has "most people have access to
abundant food, cellphone in every pocket, access to a wealth of information,
access to transportation, incredible medical advances.", if by "most people"
you mean "possible a majority of people in the richest countries in the
world". Unfortunately, the cost of that is that we've done irreparable damage
to our environment, are causing the worst Great Extinction ever, and have
caused a climate crisis that may cause us to go extinct.

~~~
assblaster
Hundreds of millions of people have been brought out of poverty, outside the
United States.

~~~
benaadams
That's due to technology; not capitalism, they aren't the same thing.

A huge amount of R&D happens in academia which isn't capitalism; but then is
monetised by capitalism (but doesn't reinvest it back into the academia)

~~~
hpkuarg
Converting that R&D into actual products and services, I'd wager, is quite
difficult without a profit incentive. It's like the difference between having
a great idea for a startup and actually turning it into a functioning company.

Without invoking too many absolutes, there's so much bullshit involved in the
latter that people doing the former aren't willing to put up with. It's mostly
two different kinds of people with two different skillsets.

------
seanhunter
For what it's worth, I used to work for GS and was in the algorithmic
brokerage business for 2009-2010. One thing a lot of commenters on this thread
are missing here is this isn't the same as an HFT or hedge fund, this is the
brokerage business - executing orders on behalf of GSs clients, who are
largely institutional investors, hedge and pension funds etc.

The real-world impact of increased speed of execution by brokers is less money
left on the table for HFTs to snap up and less slippage to the actual economic
beneficiary (ie the actual retail investor or pension fund investing people's
money gets a better trade).

~~~
jfengel
Does GS do HFT itself? Is there a conflict of interest?

~~~
known
Yes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall)

~~~
dopamean
The concept of the Chinese wall is not really relevant to this kind of
conflict of interest.

~~~
FabHK
Yeah, this here is all on the public side of the Chinese wall.

------
codingslave
People love to rail on HFT, but at this point, its really not that profitable.
It's just a reality of trading in the markets. There was a blip of time
between 2008 and 2014 when HFT was extremely profitable. Those inefficiencies
have been gone from the market for years. People were whooped into anger about
how much money was being made, at this point its a complete non issue and
needs to be removed from the highlight reels aimed at generating anger in the
public. Lets move on from discussing the boogey man that is HFT, its really
nothing.

~~~
collyw
>People love to rail on HFT

probably because it's difficult to see any actual value that this provides to
society.

~~~
reallydontask
> probably because it's difficult to see any actual value that this provides
> to society.

Doesn't this apply to a _majority_ of activities in the financial sector?

~~~
fooker
No, a large fraction of modern tech and companies would not exist without the
'activities in the financial sector'.

Essentially any endeavor requiring capital beyond your means would have to be
bootstrapped or required borrowing money at exorbitant rates. There is a
reason the financial sector exists. It makes money by selling convenience and
taking over quantified risk.

~~~
reallydontask
My point is not that the financial sector is unnecessary, it's that the
majority of the activities are not of benefit to society, which admittedly is
something hard to define.

Following on from that line of thought, it could be argued that a lot of
companies don't provide any benefit to society, so the financial sector is
just enabling these firms and thus of no benefit to society.

~~~
kortilla
The sector exists because people willingly give it money in exchange for
services. If you can’t imagine why that’s happening, maybe read up on why
people pay for financial services rather than assuming something as stupid as
most of financial services not providing benefit to society.

~~~
smolder
No one's confused why it's happening. It's legal to make money through
financial services, and it reliably makes money. The investments into fintech
that divert more cash one way or another until others catch up also provide
very little and ever diminishing value, mostly just sideways and upward
redistribution of wealth. The actual value generating sectors of the economy
are always getting more anemic, and they're due for collapse because of how
much everything depends on oil, cheap 3rd world labor, and creating external
costs we've avoided facing.

~~~
kortilla
>No one's confused why it's happening. It's legal to make money through
financial services, and it reliably makes money.

No, you’re misunderstanding me. People are willingly using the services
offered by the financial services sector. It’s the reason companies can
quickly raise billions through IPOs, the reason you can get a million dollars
for a mortgage and pay it back over 30 years, etc. Market participants that
enable better price discovery and subsequently narrow bid/ask spreads provide
immense value to society.

An average of just a quarter percent lower interest on mortgages is billions
of dollars kept in people’s pockets. More efficient markets enable that and
it’s these traders you loath that are making it more efficient. If it were
just up to the banks they would love nice slow markets with huge spreads so
they can line their pockets with your money.

>The actual value generating sectors of the economy

Sigh, that statement makes no sense already because finance generates massive
value. It’s the reason people can retire. It’s the reason normal people can
buy houses. It’s the reason normal people can start capital intensive
businesses.

Efficient allocation of capital is one of the largest force multipliers of any
modern economy. You lament that other sectors are anemic, but many could not
even exist if it weren’t for financial instruments that allow them to control
costs, raise capital, etc.

~~~
smolder
> Sigh, that statement makes no sense already because finance generates
> massive value.

I think it's not clear what I meant by value generation, and that's on me as
I'm sure there's an established meaning that differs from mine. In my eyes,
moving money from one person to another is not value generation. Only work
that improves the net quality of life is generating value.

As an example, someone who spends all day digging holes and filling them in
for money has destroyed value, because their work helps no one and the money
transfer is almost neutral overall. Being a facilitator of mutually beneficial
trade has value, but work that only extracts wealth destroys value by using
labor to no net benefit --they could have been enjoying their time instead.

It's not something you can easily measure, but through this lens you can see
how much of what we allocate human effort to is a waste.

~~~
kortilla
>In my eyes, moving money from one person to another is not value generation.
Only work that improves the net quality of life is generating value.

Right, and that’s naive at best. There isn’t an unlimited supply of money.
Choosing where to place money can result in massive value creation or
destruction.

Labor (or physical work by anything) and value have no implicit or explicit
relationship. That line of thinking has been discredited so many times (even
in your own ditch digging example) that it’s not really worth getting into
here.

------
stakhanov
...actually it doesn't sound to me like this article is about HFT-based prop
trading at all (prop trading would mean Goldman Sachs taking positions onto
their own books), but about the business unit called GSAT (Goldman Sachs
algorithmic trading) who execute trades on behalf of clients, so never taking
any positions onto their own books.

The traditional market model used to be that at every point in time, a market
maker would offer a price to buy/sell at. The bid would, of course, be lower
than the ask, the difference being called the spread. When a pension fund
wanted to execute a trade, they would have had to cross the spread, and,
statistically speaking, half the spread would immediately accrue to the market
maker as profit. ..so this is money that YOU, the holder of a pension, are
losing, and that THEY, the rich folks acting as market makers that the public
likes to get mad at, are taking away from you.

The business model of GSAT is that a pension fund can ask Goldman Sachs to use
algorithms to do things on their behalf that are less naive than what I just
described above and end up giving less money to the market maker. For example,
GSAT can become a market maker on your behalf, but make a market on only one
side, i.e. only offer a price to buy at or only offer a price to sell at, with
the resulting trades being executed on your behalf, so it is now you who makes
money off those trades, in the same way as it would traditionally be a market
maker's privilege to do.

The public loves to get mad at Wall Street. But they should please get their
facts straight about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.

~~~
stillworks
Have to agree.

Catering to HFT shops was already in 100 microsecond latency a few years ago
using commodity hardware and software (cannot speak of Goldman Sachs but
another one of similar ilk, can't imagine GS were much far away if not even
better)

~~~
mieseratte
Worked in an HFT shop and we were down to optimizing nanoseconds. Lots of
folks had war stories about spending months to shave off tens of nanoseconds
off pieces used millions of times per day.

~~~
stillworks
Yep, I have heard such stories. "Folks" were FPGA engineers and one of their
primary target was to be able to cache "stuff" in SRAM as much as possible as
that is the part which yields nanosecond latency.

My experience was more along the "man in the middle" setups which HFT shops
used to hide their trading in the shorter term. The man in the middle got
better prices at the exchange due to increased volumes and the HFT shop got a
fairly good opportunity to hide it's activity for a short while.

At a later stage at some venues, the HFT shop did not even need to route their
orders via MITM, the MITM simply got a firehose of HFT's execution reports to
reverse build the order books !

Smoke and mirrors...(and nonsense)

------
vannevar
It seems like we could save a lot of pointless expenditure on an ultimately
meaningless arms race in flash trading if we imposed reasonable limits on the
time required to hold an equity in order for a trade to be legally recognized.

~~~
nickles
> pointless expenditure on an ultimately meaningless arms race

What about price discovery is pointless? Would you prefer that prices update
only once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Realtime pricing of securities and
derivatives is critical for an efficiently functioning economy.

> if we imposed reasonable limits on the time required to hold an equity in
> order for a trade to be legally recognized

This would damage the ability of market makers to function, ultimately driving
up the cost of offering pensions, 401k plans, retail investing, low fee ETFs,
etc. If these companies are willing to spend their money competing for the
ability to offer you a better, faster price, why is this upsetting?

If you're opposed to the emphasis on latency in equity markets, focus on rule
612 of Reg NMS, which prohibits showing more competitive prices.

~~~
em500
> What about price discovery is pointless? Would you prefer that prices update
> only once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Realtime pricing of securities
> and derivatives is critical for an efficiently functioning economy.

Pretty much everything at sub-second resolution is pointless.

I'd like to hear a coherent argument how realtime or even sub-second pricing
of securities and derivatives is critical for an efficiently functioning
economy, yet the largest markets in the world are closed 2/3rd of the day.

The fact that most markets are closed on all weekends plus over 10 holidays
per year suggests that even an update once per day wouldn't make much of a
difference.

~~~
jiggawatts
This. A million times this. All possible arguments for price discovery are
totally invalidated by regular market closures.

Conversely, if sub-second resolution is somehow "a good", then by extension
sub-millisecond price discovery is "even better". There are some insane people
that state this kind of gibberish with a straight face.

If millisecond are good, then surely microseconds are even better! Next...
nanosecond resolution price discovery for the uuuuuultimate liquidity.

~~~
gpderetta
Would you be happy if regulators mandated that airplane control systems can
only sample their input at most every second?

HFT systems look a lot like feedback driven control loops. Mandating a minimum
resolution would be ridiculous.

~~~
dredmorbius
If what you're sampling and responding to is noise, then yes, it's pointless.

If what you're sampling and responding to is noise, and the responses
themselves generate self-perpetuating expanding feedbacks, it's worse than
useless: it's actively harmful.

------
vijaybritto
"Using so-called microservices to break complicated problems into easy-to-
solve ones"

I would love to see microservices which actually solve problems and reduce
complexity! :(

~~~
winrid
I am curious how that will help latency here. It must be pretty bad if
refactoring and adding more network connections is an improvement.

~~~
DrBazza
They were likely running old Tibco/RV systems (network) distributed across the
network (common for 1990s to early 2000 trading systems), and replaced the
system (and hardware) with multi-core boxes, and use shared memory for message
passing. Reduces _internal_ latency from milliseconds to sub-microsecond.

~~~
winrid
Makes sense in this case. I guess you can just deploy the microservices as
containers on the same machine or what have you.

------
ralph84
Most exchanges have an auction process that sets opening and closing prices.
They let everyone get their orders in and then run an algorithm to find the
price that will execute the most volume.

They could do the same process every 5 minutes and only allow stocks to trade
in the auction. Then all of the resources used on pointless HFT could be used
on something economically productive.

~~~
compsciphd
even every 1s. If we can do auctions for web ads, we can do auctions for the
stock exchange.

~~~
nickles
> even every 1s. If we can do auctions for web ads, we can do auctions for the
> stock exchange.

There was ~$107 billion in online advertising in 2018. There was ~$145 billion
traded in Nasdaq listed equities _yesterday_.

Global financial markets and online advertising have different requirements.

[0] [https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-
trends/spending-...](https://www.marketingcharts.com/advertising-
trends/spending-and-spenders-108416)

[1]
[http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummar...](http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/Trader.aspx?id=DailyMarketSummary)

~~~
buzzdenver
> There was ~$107 billion in online advertising in 2018. There was ~$145
> billion traded in Nasdaq listed equities yesterday.

That is a pointless comparison. That $107b was all revenue for somebody
(Google, Facebook, etc), while the $145b was just the nominal value of shares
traded.

(edited typo)

~~~
nickles
> That is a pointless comparison.

I was highlighting the difference between online advertising and financial
markets. They operate at different scales.

> That $107b was all revenue for somebody (Google, Facebook, etc), while the
> $145b was just the nominal value of shares traded.

These are cash instruments, not derivatives, so that is indeed $145b of cash
changing hands each day.

~~~
kasey_junk
I’ve worked in both. For the purpose of the earlier conversation, the auctions
for ad exchanges happen at about 1 order of magnitude more than for exchange
tradable symbols.

That is to say there is no tech reason that financial exchanges couldn’t run
auctions.

Aside: personally I think that continuous exchanges are great & people who
have problems with them usually don’t know what they are talking about.

------
jedberg
Can someone explain to me what is gained by processing the trades in real time
vs. batching the processing into say 1 second increments? What does GS gain by
being able to get their trade there a few milliseconds before the competition
and what do I as a consumer gain from this?

~~~
maximente
suppose "real time" means order of magnitude milliseconds for example's sake.

the price could change a bunch in that interval of 1000ms. you may think "well
only slightly" \- fractions of cents - but if GS can make fractions of pennies
on those events, scaled up to all seconds that the market is open, you can see
why that's potentially attractive.

for whatever it's worth, GS in 2009 claimed that HFT generated <1% of their
profits. whether you believe that is another thing.

~~~
jedberg
Ok that explains why they want to do it, but how does it benefit the market to
allow that? How does it benefit the consumers and corporations? In other
words, what is the argument against creating a law that requires a minimum of
1 second batches for example?

~~~
alkibiades
my question would be how/who does it harm? what is the argument FOR setting
that law? other than you think it’s greedy or something?

~~~
jedberg
I don't care about the greediness, I just care about fairness. Why should GS
get the best trades just because they can make a deal to get the shortest
ethernet cables?

------
wikibob
Anyone here working at Goldman?

I’ve heard very mixed things about working there. Would love some first hand
stories!

Have things changed from some years ago where the technology didn’t really get
any respect and everyone was second class to the front office traders?

How’s the work environment? Is there still a dress code? Is the system kept
running by heroics and sleepless nights, or is there a mature understanding of
human factors?

------
Rafuino
While not related to high frequency trading, per se, the Google research on
the gap between nanosecond and millisecond latencies (AKA "attack of the
killer microseconds") springs to mind with this article. Typically the
hardware bottleneck in HFT, I assume, is network latency, which leads to
colocating trading servers near the exchanges themselves...so how do you
improve on that? Smart NICs/FPGAs? Better non-volatile storage (there's
hardware on the market today that's getting us to read latencies in the single
digits on PCIe bus at least)...? ASICs for HFT specifically? This is obviously
a marketing piece put out to attract quants to Goldman Sachs given the lack of
detail, but I naturally wonder where that $100M is going to be invested.

[https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/4/215032-attack-of-
the-k...](https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/4/215032-attack-of-the-killer-
microseconds/fulltext)

~~~
pjc50
It's certainly possible to do it in FPGA, I was involved in this project a few
years ago: [http://www.argondesign.com/news/2014/jun/23/ultra-low-
latenc...](http://www.argondesign.com/news/2014/jun/23/ultra-low-latency-hft-
options-trading-system/)

Although it limits the complexity of the model and makes it harder to iterate
on the development of the model.

------
heelix
I know a couple of the folks doing this sort of coding and while I'll tweak my
APIs to be in the 10s of milliseconds they are tuning for nanosecond
optimization. Crazy to see code where the speed of light is becoming a
bottleneck.

------
m0rphling
Tom Scott did a nice video [1] on IEX's setup with 38 miles of fiber to add
enough latency as a mechanism of fairness. Purportedly, this benefits all
exchanges after it was successfully deployed. It seems like the incentives are
not there for larger, more established exchanges to implement such blanket
latency. So, firms like GS see a benefit to this kind of investment.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4)

------
tosh
A great read on high frequency trading: Barbarians at the Gate

[https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2536492](https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2536492)

~~~
harryh
Title is actually Barbarians at the Gateways which is, of course, as play on
words on the actual Barbarians at the Gate:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fall_of_RJR_Nabisco)

Another great tail of finance that operated at much slower speeds.

------
sytelus
I would highly recommend the move Hummingbird Project which does a pretty good
job of what it takes to build this kind of networks:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8DweHM0Gnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8DweHM0Gnc)

------
ausbah
To me this is incredibly ridiculous, millions more dumped into the brain
draining maw of finance.

~~~
taspeotis
Forgive the AMP link but Bloomberg has a paywall of sorts now.

[https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinio...](https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2019-03-11/you-
need-a-big-tower-to-trade-stocks)

> And while Scientel clearly has high-frequency trading in mind—“the name that
> keeps coming up among industry sources is Citadel”—that’s not all it has in
> mind. It’s a tower that can send signals for lots of stuff. “Scientel has
> said it will equip its Aurora tower with 28 antennas—24 for public safety
> and municipal use and four for ‘private’ purposes.” People often complain
> that high-frequency trading encourages a socially wasteful arms race, and
> you certainly see some of that here, as lots of trading firms compete to put
> their antennas as close as possible to the CME servers. But another way to
> interpret this story is that high-frequency trading is subsidizing high-tech
> communications infrastructure for everyone else, building towers to send
> high-speed signals for public safety and municipal use just to justify a
> couple of high-frequency trading antennas.

~~~
ausbah
Reminds me of this comic

[https://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3890](https://smbc-
comics.com/index.php?id=3890)

------
tjpaudio
I really wish we would curb this kind of behavior. Even if this speed is
related to the brokerage business and not HFT, it is unfair to retail
investors that large businesses have better market access. My solution:
exchanges are required by law to process contracts in pulses with strict
execution ordering rules. E.g., every 15 seconds process all buy and sells,
processing from highest bid and lowest ask first for each security. Basically
a turn-based stock market.

------
sabujp
their stock isn't doing so great, it seems to track the rest of the financial
markets (bac, jpm, c, etc)

------
decoyworker
Profiting in this way seems to be a bastardization of the purpose of the
market and provides no value.

------
gekkeboom
This is called rent seeking. Just siphoning money from society without any
benefit.

------
JudgeWapner
Tangentially related, but I wonder how long before HFT harnesses neutrino
transmission to send market data directly through the earth? The MINOS [1]
project is underway to send neutrinos from Fermilab in Illinois to detectors
in northern Minnesota. Straight through the earth's crust.

Detecting neutrinos is hard, and modulating data on them will probably be even
more difficult, but if it shaves a few micro/milliseconds off trading time,
I'm sure someone will make it happen eventually. HFT have already added
dedicated undersea fiber-optic links [can't find source, NYC->LDN is obvious,
I think there was talk or they began one from CHI/NYC->TOK but might be wrong,
it involved the melting icecaps to easily sink the fiber cable], shortwave
radio broadcasts [3], and microwave links [4]. I think HFT is frivolous,
personally, but if it helps networking I think it would be cool to someday
talk "on neutrinos" through the center of the earth!

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS)

[3] [https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-
tr...](https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2018/05/07/shortwave-trading-part-
i-the-west-chicago-tower-mystery/)

[4] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/priva...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/)

~~~
smallnamespace
So some quick Googling shows that the neutrino beam fires every 1.3 seconds[1]
and the 'near' detector on average captures 20 neutrinos, the 'far' detector
sees <1 detection [2]. Note that the latter paper is from 2005 so this may
have been substantially upgraded.

Each 'spill' takes 8.67 milliseconds, so if you simply vary the firing time to
send a signal using coordinated clocks, naively you could send up to ln(1000 /
8.67) = 6.8 bits per second, but at the cost of the very latency that you're
trying to minimize.

I'm sure there are smarter schemes, like also varying the neutrino beam
density, but at 20 neutrinos per detection there's not much channel capacity
in the amplitude either.

It looks like the main bottleneck is in the neutrino generation though, you
can use more accelerator beams without needing to build more detectors right
away.

Note also that the 'far' detector is only 500 miles away, so depending on how
collimated the neutrino beam is you may be losing a lot of signal to get all
the way through the Earth.

[1]
[http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html](http://nusoft.fnal.gov/nova/public/neutrinos.html)

[2]
[http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf](http://neutron.physics.ucsb.edu/docs/MINOS_info.pdf)

~~~
JudgeWapner
They got this far with public funding, that's enough for proof of concept. Let
the billion-dollar budgets of institutional/prop trading desks see what they
can do with this technology.

------
puskavi
yay more control to bankers!

------
dboreham
Vamipre Squid...

------
ta4534543fdgd
They've taken greed into stellar territory! Well done...

------
dp141
Amazing to me how much impassioned defence there is of HFT. I assume a lot of
the HN readership works in HFT.

------
xvilka
Would be nice to read more about technical sides of this transition. Also
getting rid of Java code, that is so popular among financial institutions,
will increase the speed. Something like Rust is a perfect fit[1] for such
industries.

[1] [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/proposal-business-
applicat...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/proposal-business-applications-
working-group/10400)

------
abalone
I was pretty impressed by Rust's latest showing in the techempower benchmarks.
The Actix framwork blew the ceiling off of previous benchmarks. SIMD code,
lock free, static dispatch, pipelined postgres driver, and other performance
enhancements.[1] As fast or faster than the C/C++ frameworks.

[1]
[https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/48...](https://github.com/TechEmpower/FrameworkBenchmarks/issues/4834)

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MuffinFlavored
Does Goldman Sachs use Rust/actix for quick trading?

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H8crilA
People that are very serious about it use ASICs/FPGAs. I'm sure Goldman does
too.

For slightly slower stuff it's the garbage collector and OS scheduling that's
the problem (as both can unpredictably inject many milliseconds pauses). No GC
and good usage of low level kernel primitives is the game.

