
Speed Traders Invade Sleepy Corner of England, Locals Bristle - chollida1
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/speed-traders-invade-sleepy-corner-of-england-and-locals-bristle
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titanomachy
> for now at least, microwave signals are among the fastest ways to transmit
> orders between exchanges.

I think the author could have asserted this with a little more confidence.
Short of building a vacuum tube, which would be about 0.03% faster, microwave
signal is (and will continue to be) the fastest way we of transmitting
information from England to Germany, or from anywhere to anywhere else for
that matter.

Although, if anyone is going to completely overhaul our understanding of
physics and develop faster-than-light communication it'll probably be high-
frequency traders. I think Wall Street already hires more physics PhDs than
all the universities in my country combined.

~~~
seanp2k2
Sad waste of talent, just like all the people trying to figure out how to get
more eyeballs on advertising. Physics people trying to eek out a millisecond
or two out of a trading system in order to front-run order books just seems so
trite and short-sighted. It's personally very disappointing that we exist in
an economy which so highly incentivizes this type of endeavor.

~~~
titanomachy
I agree, but I think a lot of those physicists would love to work in physics
if they could find a job. No one spends 6 years studying neutrino flavours
because they want to make tons of money working in finance.

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ldayley
For original, in-depth, on-the-ground, and ongoing commentary on HFT
developments in this region I recommend reading the "Sniper in Mahwah"
blog(1). It gets a lot more technical, among other things. His posts are
regularly featured here on HN(2).

(1)[https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/](https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/)

(2)[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sniperinmahwah](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sniperinmahwah)

~~~
chippy
Also of note, Mahwah is the small town where Wall Street effectively moved to.

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krapht
Yet another case of NIMBYism. Why does the community get to decide on what is
done with private property? A radio tower mast harms nobody, will not
significantly affect traffic, utilization of public utilities, or pollute.

It's telling, the comment at the end. 100,000 pounds? Not enough. We need to
extract more from those evil financial companies, because they can afford it.
What a naked money grab.

~~~
wlesieutre
> What a naked money grab.

Whereas high frequency trading is what, exactly?

It'd be one thing if the radio tower were needed to serve a useful purpose,
but why should they be able to impose it on a community to shave a couple
milliseconds off of latency so financiers can play stock market games?

Maybe I'm not well educated on the issue, but is HFT not just a gigantic zero-
sum arms race where the participants would all love to stop wasting money on
it except they're worried that someone else would one-up them by half a
millisecond?

~~~
pjlegato
This is a straw man reply. It isn't responsive to the original objection --
why should the government get to decide whether someone can build a radio
tower on private property, provided that it doesn't adversely impact anyone
else? The proposed use of the tower is irrelevant.

~~~
wlesieutre
I don't know what the land use laws are over there, but I can tell you that in
the US, the government _frequently_ gets to decide whether someone can build a
radio tower on private property.

I'm fairly certain if someone bought a plot of land near me and said "I'm
building a 1000 ft. tall radio mast for stock trading" they'd be promptly told
to fuck off.

On the other hand, if a project is being built to provide a public benefit,
say for an emergency radio system or something, then variances are more
likely.

~~~
foota
I don't think that answers they question of why the government _should_ be
able to do so.

~~~
wlesieutre
A more extreme example to make a point: because it would be bad if someone
could buy up the house next to me, knock it down, and replace it with a sewage
plant.

At least in the US, a large component of limiting land use is to prevent
someone from moving in with some undesirable feature and tanking an entire
neighborhood's property values, which in many cases are homes that represent a
large fraction of a lot of people's net worth (and retirement funds). Taken
too far, this can lead to crazy NIMBYism that keeps anything from being built
anywhere, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say "No, you can't put a
landfill in the residential area that's been developed here for 150 years."

Whether you think a 1000 ft. radio mast falls into that category is up for
debate, but a full-on libertarian "I can do whatever I want wherever I want
to" system wouldn't lead to very good outcomes.

~~~
belovedeagle
You were probably exaggerating, but "I can do whatever I want" is far from
libertarian. Indeed, forbidding imposing uncompensated the externality of
decreased land values in this situation is one of the defining aspects of
libertarianism as opposed to, say, anarchism or socialism (where you pay a fee
to the government - excuse me, the People's Party - to do whatever you want).

~~~
ZeroGravitas
You are correct, but I'd like to clarify that property rights on land is one
of libertarianism's big things mostly because rich folk own a lot of land.

They'll defend having a "big government" that'll commit violence to protect
rich people's land and they'll pay for that with taxes that they would
otherwise decry as theft at gunpoint.

Contrast this with their general approach to industry dumping carbon or other
pollution into the air and suggestions to price in those externalities.

~~~
belovedeagle
You clearly have no clue what the term "big government" means. It doesn't mean
your local Sheriff's office, at lower staffing levels than needed for the drug
war.

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SEJeff
FWIW, said financial firms do pay very well for the rights to use those
towers, and they almost always have to employ local or relatively local tower
climbers and ground crew to maintain them. If Vodaphone wanted a tower in this
town, it wouldn't be news.

Disclaimer: I work for one of the two companies mentioned as having applied
for permits in TFA.

~~~
stuaxo
Pretty sure Vodafone would not be building one nearly as high.

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goatforce5
Can the council build the tower and then rent space to the network operators,
using the money to fund local services?

~~~
walrus01
From a financial perspective it is not that costly to build a 300 meter guyed
tower. FM radio stations in the Midwest and TV stations do it all the time.
I've heard figures of around $2 million total for an 1800' in ND. Yes you
could build a tower and rent space on it. Whether this makes sense for a local
government to do is another question.

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sireat
I keep hoping that some of this massive brain drain trying to shave off the
last ms of latency (FPGAwork, microwave towers, etc etc) will somehow
translate into some advancement good for the overall society.

Also, I hope the rapidly diminishing returns will stop this ridiculous arms
race.

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bogomipz
Is there a reason these HFT firms can't put servers in a DC in Frankfurt? What
am I missing?

~~~
pja
They almost certainly already have servers in a DC in Frankfurt - the point is
that being able to communicate current prices between the major markets faster
than anyone else gives you a trading edge over other market participants.

~~~
bogomipz
Doesn't the trading logic live on that machine in the a data center in
Frankfurt? It responds to signals and executes trades based on those signal
correct? It doesn't require hitting an API like in a standard web app right?
From my admittedly limited exposure to an electronic trading shop, that logic
was maybe updated a few times a day but largely ran as a state machine based
on signals and market feeds. What am I missing?

~~~
pja
Sure, some HFT strats are locally encoded. But that’s not the only way to make
money. If what you want to do is run arbitrage between different exchanges
then being faster than everyone else gives you an edge. You can take advantage
of price differentials before anyone else does plus you get to front run news
that has market impact round the world before anyone else can get their orders
in.

There are plenty of ways to make money if you’re faster than everyone else at
getting data from exchange A to exchange B.

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upofadown
That's quite the long path over water. Hope they don't have strong temperature
inversions there...

Perhaps the plan is to just quit trading when the link is down. Make money
when they can...

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tluyben2
Why put it in a little village and not in the center of London? Cities (imho)
are eye sore galore already so more eye sores don't really make a difference,
while in a quaint English town it changes everything.

~~~
Luc
Because the earth is a sphere and microwaves travel in a straight line.

At my height, standing on the beach the horizon I see is only 5km away.

~~~
collyw
Huh, why does that make building it in the city / countryside any different?

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mjevans
Why aren't they building a fiber optic link? Is it that the shipping channel
makes it too likely for disruption of the link?

~~~
walrus01
Light in fiber moves at about 0.66c due to bouncing off the walls of the fiber
trillions of times in a short distance.

~~~
eck
It moves at that speed because the index of refraction of glass is about 1.5.
In single-mode fiber the light doesn't really bounce off the walls.

~~~
sgt101
Also significant latency is imposed by the network architecture vs the choice
of bearer, and by shared vs single user. My guess is that the main driver is
actually to get a private channel with qos guarantees and as few
retransmission hops and security bumps as possible.

