Low-Latency.com

I’m in the green and pleasant land, aka England, trying to partake in some R&R. But I can’t escape work, even when I am in historic Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and later home of William Shakespeare. It seems the Bard knew a thing or two about low latency, or at least about leveraging it.
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The first SIA (now SIFMA) show I attended was in 1986. In some ways, it was quite different to the event last week, while in other ways it was pretty much the same.
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I’m referring to last week’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference and Exhibit in NYC. True, the new name (the result of the SIA’s merger with the Bond Association) was a bit of a put off - many people suggested that SIFMA sounded like some horrible strain of bird flu - but otherwise it’s been the best SIA (sic) Show I’ve been to in years.
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I’m writing this posting from Montreal, Canada, where I just watched a thrilling Formula 1 grand prix, won by British rookie Lewis Hamilton. An amazing achievement in only his sixth F1 race. So what has F1 got to do with low latency?
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A couple of weeks ago, together with Reuters, we conducted a survey of the marketplace to find out how well latency measurement is entrenched, and what users thought of datafeed providers and measurement tool vendors. And we asked them to comment on their current market data handling infrastructures too.

One figure that came back - which I had an instant gut reaction against - is that 39 per cent of respondents reckon their systems are adequate to cope with increasing market data volumes. To me, this number seemed just too high, given what we are being told to expect about data rates from OPRA, etc. A further 31 per cent reckoned their systems would be able to cope following planned upgrades.
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I’m writing this blog from the Red Carpet Club at SFO … heading back to NYC in an hour. It’s been a great week out here in the Bay Area catching up with some old friends and making some new ones.

Earlier in the week, I attended the Open Source Business Conference. One of the highlights was a panel featuring Jason Maynard, an analyst with Credit Suisse. He’s very forthright with his views, and sometimes they hurt. A few weeks ago he downgraded Tibco’s stock, in part because of the emergence of the open source messaging project known as AMQP.
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I am posting this from the San Francisco Bay Area, and it just struck me that a couple of major players from these parts were recently the subject of posts on this portal.  What’s more, they are companies that – despite being once huge on Wall Street – I hadn’t expected to be covering in connection with the world of low latency.  I speak of Sybase and Sun Microsystems.
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So, those party animals at ACTIV Financial have invited me to a little gathering tonight - at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square - to formally launch ActivFeed MPU, their new hardware-accelerated feed handling software.  It should be an great event, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about the black art of programming FPGAs (that’s Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - an emerging technology that could have a huge impact on low latency systems.
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The one constant in the world of financial markets IT is that nothing stays the same for very long. The world of market data feeds and the applications that process them is no exception.

As data rates increase, and as processing systems (or any component of them) are upgraded and modified, performance can be hit. The trick is to constantly monitor the environment to pre-empt potential problems. But what should one monitor?
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In his blog last week, Andrew said he’s skeptical that advantages from investing in low latency infrastructure will be anything other than short lived.

I tend to share his opinion that low latency is passing through, though I am less of a skeptic (Andrew’s turning French). To me, the current focus on low latency is simply the way that Wall Street works, such that it does. There’s an opportunity to be had – to rise above the crowd, to make money – and so the top tier of the financial markets are all over it, doing just that (or at least they think they are).
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