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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (33456)	9/7/2017 12:34:48 PM
From: zzpat	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 362916

You're simply incorrect when it comes to the location of these super computers. To get that tiny fraction of a second advantage they need to be as close to the actual exchange as possible. I'm not suggesting you can't have HFT beyond that point, but once this technology was developed land values near exchanges soared. But none of this is as important as the damage HFT causes, including flash crashes and market chaos. I'd have a hard time thinking of one good thing that comes from computer programs buying and selling within a fraction of second, surely no economic value for the country so why should it be taxed at a low rate?

To: TimF who wrote (33456)	9/7/2017 9:40:43 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 362916

The relevant definition of "near" in this case is based on light speed lag. Anywhere in the same city would be "near", No and no. The relevant definition of 'near' is number of hops through the various routers and switches. Which increase with distance. That is what determines latency. But even if that wasn't the case, you have a major misconception of how fast modern computers are. Even slow computers exceed a gigahertz these days and execute several instructions per cycle. In one nanosecond, i.e. the time for a cycle at 1Ghz, light travels about 11 inches in a vacuum. Through copper the electrons travel maybe half that distance due to resistance. Grace Hopper used to pass out wires about 11 inches long to illustrate what a nanosecond means to her classes when she gave lectures on computers. And Grace died some years ago. The speed of light is very relevant to modern electronics. It is slow compared to what we can switch circuits at. I buy little boards out of China. They cost me less than $10 each. They run Linux on a quad core processor running at 1.2Ghz. The point is, the cost of processing power where the speed of light is relevant is really, really low. HFTs spend a lot more than $10 for their systems. Really Tim, it is all that hard to do a little research before you start spouting off?