The 500 Millisecond Advantage

by zen53 • 17 years ago

23 8 17 years ago

3pt14159• 17 years ago

Reminds me of a story where one of the major investment banks figured out (with some pretty advanced statistical models) that certain buyers of stocks set bought in certain intervals to avoid getting pushed up into a higher price. For example, say Sun Life was to buy 100k stocks of Microsoft stock. Rather than buying all 100k at once for a price of 23.45 - 23.60 per stock they would split it up into 5 orders of 20k stock that would execute on the 11th minute of the hour. The investment bank would see what was going on, based on Sun's past actions, and would temporarily long MSFT stock for 60 seconds before the order went through and make a tiny bit of profit.

pkrumins• 17 years ago

All this is total dark magic to me.

eli2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure why you would link the info graphic and not the article it came from:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html

chime• 17 years ago

Because the two graphics are not exactly the same. The one linked in this post was made by a redditor: http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/94gv2/this_is_how_...

I cannot attest to whether the linked graphic is correct or not. However, the NYT article has a 30ms advantage whereas this one talks about a 500ms one.

eli2• 17 years ago

Weird, you're right. I would assume it's an earlier version of the NYT's graphic. Looks like they were made by the same person.

All things being equal, however, I'll trust the NYT over "some redditor"

vlorch• 17 years ago

i've heard about this practice of traders "front running" a client's large trades to that will move the market quite a few times, and the story is almost always followed by something like "and now he's run off to {insert somehwere low-key and nice} and bought a boat"

davetufts• 17 years ago

"500 milliseconds" sounds so much faster than "half a second".

The 500 Millisecond Advantage

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