HFT: The rise of the picosecond

Today let me share a news article on High Frequency Trading where the trading in near future can be even faster than millisecond. The term of breakup of second is "picosecond." i.e. one trillionth of a second.

How will this affect the traditional trading is yet to be seen?

The article:

Just when you thought high-speed cash equities trading could not get any faster, trading geeks have thrown a new concept into the mix: the picosecond.

 

A second is a long time in cash equities trading. Four or five years ago, trading firms started to talk of trading speeds in terms of milliseconds.

A millisecond is one thousandth of a second or, put another way, 200 times faster than the average speed of thought. In the time it took your brain to tell your hand to click on this article, a broker or market-making firm trading in milliseconds could fill hundreds of orders on an exchange.

Milliseconds, however, are now ancient history. In the past two or three years, trading speeds have been shaved down to inconceivably tiny increments: from milliseconds to microseconds, and more recently to nanoseconds.

But in recent weeks trading geeks have started to talk about picoseconds in what is a truly mind-boggling concept: a picosecond is one trillionth of a second. Put another way, a picosecond is to one second what one second is to 31,700 years.

Speaking at a London conference on Tuesday, Donal Byrne, chief executive of Corvil, a high-speed trading technology company, caused a ripple of audible incredulity throughout the room when he suggested that trading speeds could be reduced to picoseconds in the not too distant future.

Read complete article at  The rise of the picosecond.