A number of power surges and outages have been experienced in the East Grinstead area of the UK in recent months. Utility companies involved have traced the cause to one of three high capacity feeds to a Global Investment bank’s data centre facility.
The profits created by the same bank’s London based Propriety Trading group has increased tenfold in the same time.
This bank employs 1% of the world’s best post-doctoral theoretical Physics graduates to help build its black box trading systems
Could there be a connection? Wild & unconfirmed rumours have been circulating within the firm that a major breakthrough in removing the problem of latency – the physical limitation the time it takes a signal to transfer down a wire – ultimately governed by of the speed of light.
For years traders have been trying to reduce execution latency to provide competitive advantage in a highly competitive fast moving environment. The focus has moved from seconds to milli and now microsecond savings.
Many Financial Services & technology organisations have attempted to solve this problem through reducing data hopping, routing, and going as far as placing their hardware physically close to the source of data (such as in an Exchange’s data centre) to minimise latency but no one has solved the issue – yet.
It sounds like this bank may have gone one step further. It is known that at the boundary of the speed of light – physics as we know it -changes (Quantum mechanics is an example where the time/space continuum becomes ‘fuzzy’). Conventional physics states that travelling faster than the speed of light and see into the future would require infinite energy and so is not possible.
Investigation with a number of insiders at the firm has resulted in an amazing and almost unbelievable insight. They have managed to build a device which ‘hovers’ over the present and immediate future – little detail is known about it but it is understood to be based on the previously unproven ‘Alcubierre drive’ principle. This allows the trading system to predict (in reality observe) the next direction in the market providing invaluable trading advantage.
The product is still in test mode as the effects of trading ahead of the data they have already traded against is producing outages in the system as it then tries to correct the error in the future data which again changes the data ad finitum… The prediction model only allows a small glimpse into the immediate future which also limits the window of opportunity for trading.
The power requirements for the equipment are so large that they have had to been moved to the data centre environment where consumption can be more easily hidden (or not as the power outages showed).
If the bank does really crack this problem then they will have the ultimate trading advantage – the ability to see into the future and trade with ‘inside’ knowledge legally. Unless another bank is doing similar in the ‘trading arms race’ then the bank will quickly become dominant and the other banks may go out of business.
The US Congress have apparently discovered some details of this mechanism and are requesting the bank to disclose details of the project. The bank is understandably reluctant to do this as it has spent over $80m developing this and wants to make some return on its investment.
If this system goes into true production mode surely it cannot be long before Financial Regulators outlaw the tool as it will both distort and ultimately destroy the markets.
Of course the project has a codename…. Project Tachyons
No one from the company was available to comment on the accuracy of the claims.