Consider that this summer ice-breaking and cable-laying ships are scheduled to create the first-ever fiber optic cables through the Arctic Ocean. There are supposed to be three such cables when the planned work is done: two on the Canadian and one on the Russian side of the pole.
Each of these cables will connect Tokyo with London, and they are expected to shave 60 milliseconds off the time it takes for data to get from one of those cities to the other.
My first thought in this connection...

A recent paper by three attorneys of the multi-national law firm of Covington & Burling LLP says that algorithmic trading is now “squarely in the cross-hairs of securities and commodities regulators,” in large part due to the flash crash of May 6, 2010.
The authors/attorneys are: David L. Kornblau, Allison Lurton, and Jonathan M. Sperling (respectively, as below). Their paper, which appeared in the Securities Regulation & Law Report in February, cites a joint...

If you manage algorithmic funds you know perfectly well that your ability to produce for your investors depends upon an evanescent ‘edge.’ You have to be doing something that is different from what all the other algorithmic funds are doing.
There are several reasons why no edge lasts long. First, algorithmic trading is a field that invites both parallel invention and reverse engineering. The competitors who know what you’re doing can hire smart people to figure out how....

In a new working paper, Godfrey Cadogan, of Toronto’s Ryerson University, offers a stock-price formula designed to capture the “empirical regularities of high frequency trading.”
As is often the case, though, the discussion can leave those of us outside the quant world confused: does the rendering of facts as a formula make them clearer, or does it just create a potentially misleading patina of precision?
Given Cadogan’s ambitious-sounding program, linking HFT,...

On Dec. 13, the Commodity Futures Trading Association’s Technology Advisory Group held its year-end meeting. There were three items on the agenda. One of these was how to define and classify high-frequency trades (HFT) for purposes of monitoring their impact on the markets.
About 15 months before, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority had fined Trillium Brokerage Services $1 million for an illicit trading strategy in which HFT featured prominently. That sanction also involved...