[HN Gopher] Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
___________________________________________________________________
Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?
Author : lmh
Score : 84 points
Date : 2021-01-11 18:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ka7oei.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ka7oei.blogspot.com)
| cozzyd wrote:
| Hope we don't see VHF or UHF traders soon.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| Do exchanges like HF traders? I know HF traders themselves
| justify their own existence by claiming they provide liquidity to
| the markets, but I've always just sort-of rolled my eyes at that.
| They only extract value and provide none, in my opinion, tax the
| profits heavily. I think every exchange should pad each order by
| a random number between 0 and 250ms, it would take care of it.
| The company profiled in this video add lag
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8BcCLLX4N4
| cryptofistMonk wrote:
| I'm sure the exchanges like the buckets of money that HFTs pay
| them, even on their discounted commission fees. There's also
| billions in industry just around supporting HFTs, including
| FPGAs, silicon fab, networking equipment, etc. The cost to
| society of killing HFTs would probably be fairly large and imo
| the drawbacks are mostly minor.
| vladTheInhaler wrote:
| All of the money HFTs make _would_ have been made by other
| investors, presumably for reasons more related to predicting
| or responding to actual changes in market conditions. HFTs
| are parasites that basically leech value from those trades by
| executing them faster than you can, and forcing you to buy at
| a higher /sell at a lower price. I think the platonic ideal
| of a marketplace involves making money by determining the
| actual value of goods, not stealing information from others
| and jumping the line.
|
| They also contribute to a lot of market instability, see for
| instance the flash crash[1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_flash_crash
| hervature wrote:
| I don't like these type of comments because they show
| little understanding of how the market works.
|
| Explain the process in which the HFT firms "leech value"
| from your trades or "[steal] information and [jump] the
| line"? Your trade arrives at the exchange. Then, the HFT
| firms learn about your trade. They then price correct many
| instruments and derivatives that are all inter-related.
|
| Now, if we are talking about quote stuffing or
| intentionally trying to DDoS exchanges, everyone agrees
| this is bad behavior and is regulated against.
|
| Finally, as you mention, these type of algorithms
| contributed to market instability of the flash crash but it
| was also initiated by large (slow) directional bets. You
| propose taking the oxygen out of the room of a fire but one
| can also propose removing matches that started the fire.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| If prices are out of line, that definitely seems like a
| place where automated trading would be valuable. But
| HFTs' tech advantage isn't just about finding a better
| arbitrage algorithm or being smarter than the other
| traders: it's also quite clearly about exploiting a pure
| technical advantage over other traders. The fact that
| HFTs are so willing to invest in speed _even to achieve a
| tiny advantage over other HFTs_ kind of gives the game
| away.
|
| And when people quite rightly observe that having a speed
| advantage over other traders obviously allows extractive
| behavior like frontrunning, a bunch of people on HN come
| out with irate counter-takes that claim HFT are an
| unalloyed good -- never something nuanced like, "yes HFT
| could allow for some extractive behavior, but it's
| counterbalanced by these advantages which I will explain
| in detail."
|
| I guess it's also worth pointing out that these responses
| are usually from people who are involved in the HFT
| industry in some way, and usually they start out by
| accusing people of "not understanding the industry".
| Which is precisely the accusation many make against HFT:
| that it's so deliberately opaque that whatever
| indespensible contribution it's making can't easily be
| teased out by non-insiders, and we have to rely on the
| word of people who happen to be profiting from it.
| kortilla wrote:
| > The fact that HFTs are so willing to invest in speed
| even to achieve a tiny advantage over other HFTs kind of
| gives the game away.
|
| Re-pricing s&p500 futures offers in Chicago based on
| faster stock offer information from nyc is fine. It's
| improving a market making strategy or taking offers that
| look like they will now be profitable.
|
| > And when people quite rightly observe that having a
| speed advantage over other traders obviously allows
| extractive behavior like frontrunning
|
| HFTs do not front run for fucks sake. It's illegal and
| this meme needs to die. Front running is literally
| putting your order in front of a client's order.
|
| Being the fastest to realize the bottom is falling out of
| the s&p500 and selling the futures contracts on open bids
| is not front running.
| nickff wrote:
| It's also possible that HFTs make _less_ money than other
| traders would have made, if HFT is actually making markets
| more liquid.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| HFT does enhance liquidity and price discovery. The advantage
| to being "first" to trade is only there when multiple bidders
| are issuing orders at the exact same price point, and this is
| easily addressed by reducing minimum tick size so that price
| choices will just naturally disperse (as opposed to all being
| quantized at the same value).
| lumost wrote:
| My understanding is that HFTs function in a complete race to
| the bottom, with the only profitable activity being to trade
| faster and with slightly faster information than the next HFT.
| There is no secret sauce to keep them from eating each other as
| the costs to create a new HFT are not all that high vs. the
| profit opportunity of shaving a few percent off the commissions
| of the dominant trading system. Faster links and faster trades
| between exchanges mean they carry less risk when carrying out
| arbitrage (while also lowering the amount of arbitrage
| available).
|
| The fact they made crazy profits initially is more of an
| artifact that they were competing against humans rather than
| other automated systems. In a few years we may see them reach
| the point of diminishing returns where all exchanges share a
| common pool of liquidity that adapts in a few millis to new
| information.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Certainly exchanges love all paying customers.
|
| The liquidity argument is a good one IMO. If you did not have
| participants willing to arbitrage fractions of a cent per
| share, it could be really difficult to get the ends to meet on
| a daily basis for things that arent traded with as much volume
| as monsters like TSLA/AMD/et. al.
|
| The use of microwave links is just a natural consequence of
| competition within the HFT space. It might be reasonable to
| apply a minimum latency bound across the board as some
| participants have already, but I argue this would inhibit much
| of the innovation that got us to this point to start with.
| Being able to quickly clear a trade on thinly-traded securities
| is a wonderful thing for all involved. Capital not locked up in
| limit orders is more useful to humanity (in most cases).
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The inexact coordinates in the image lead to the front yard of
| some farm. Now I can't stop thinking of Kash Hill's Maxmind story
|
| ref:
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/41deg36'00.0"N+88deg36'00.0"W/
|
| ref: https://splinternews.com/how-an-internet-mapping-glitch-
| turn...
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| There's an update at the bottom:
|
| - Delmarva Broadband is authorized 14.35-14.99 MHz at 186 kW.
| Contact is a law office in DC. See
| https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm
|
| - ... and M-Wave is authorized the 14-14.99 MHz at 16 kW. See
| https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.htm
| Animats wrote:
| Well, it shouldn't be hard at that power level to find the
| transmitter if you're anywhere nearby.
| uncledave wrote:
| Not sure I understand the point of using that band past amateur
| radio. Around 20m band is terrible for point to point
| communications. The antennas are huge, the bandwidth is low, the
| noise floor is really high and it's prone to just about every
| annoying atmospheric condition possible.
| twic wrote:
| Bandwidth doesn't need to be huge for HFT. If you can send a
| message saying "there was a big upward movement in the price of
| instrument X", that's enough to be incredibly valuable if it
| gets to the other end before anyone else knows about it. There
| might only be a few dozen instruments you're interested in, and
| a few events for each one, so being able to send a single byte
| could be enough.
|
| Obviously, more bandwidth is useful, because you can send more
| details, and make better decisions at the receiving end. But
| most of the value is in getting a small message there fast.
| Animats wrote:
| If you use 186 kilowatts, you can punch through much of that.
| ridaj wrote:
| Why suspect HFTs over other potential interfering applications?
| Could be anything
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Wouldn't a high frequency trader be building point to point links
| and thus benefit hugely from highly directional antennas? Seems
| like that would help with the interference quite a bit.
| lmilcin wrote:
| At that power any spill would still be a very strong signal.
|
| Directional antennas are like gun silencers. They cause the
| signal to be many times weaker and it seems a lot until you
| figure out that the receiver works on a log scale and whatever
| is left is still registered as a strong signal.
| jaywalk wrote:
| A point to point link from Chicago to NYC would require many
| hops along the way, which is what they have with microwave
| today. The whole point of experimenting with the 20 meter band
| is to eliminate those hops.
| client4 wrote:
| More like Chicago to Seattle.
| walrus01 wrote:
| For HFT purposes, it's hard to hide an intercontinental range HF
| antenna, particularly a directional one. I know at least 3
| locations not far from the illinois CME datacenter, out in some
| fields, with huge yagi-uda antennas aimed at London and tokyo.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-01-11 22:00 UTC)