[TowerTalk] HFT

[Rob Atkinson]

I'm 40 miles west of downtown Chicago.  There are a bunch of HF
trading sites out here.   The Merc has a data center near Aurora IL.
The HF sites are all linked to that via microwave.  The yagis are all
fixed toward Europe.  The CBOE may be in on this too, not sure.  They
are licensed to run higher than ham power.  The exchanges have a lot
of money for this.   The time advantage can result in millions of
dollars in profit.  These guys have hired Ph.D. RF engineers from
other tech. companies locally, and the installations are all
sophisticated high dollar stuff.  A million bucks to buy land, hire
people, do the engineering and FCC applications, build a vault and set
up a site is nothing to the exchanges.  There's an air of secrecy to
all of it too; they don't put up signs identifying each location and
its purpose.  I imagine some of the methods such as data encoding and
error correction and frequency choices are proprietary.

Rob
K5UJ