HFT in my backyard | V
▻https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2015/01/14/hft-in-my-backyard-v
This is a well known story: in 1815, English banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild used carrier pigeons to be the first to know the end of the Battle of Waterloo. The pigeons crossed the channel easily (they didn’t have problems with water reflections), arrived in London and told Rothschild about Napoléon’s defeat, so the banker “made a killing by buying British government bonds”. The official story says Rothschild made a ton of money because he had the fastest transmission technology (pigeons) but that’s not true: the other part of the story (nearly unknown) is that Napoléon had a faster technology than the Columbidae: the télégraphe Chappe. In short, this ”optical“ or “aerial” network invented by Claude Chappe employed various semaphore relay stations to carry information all around France:
These networks were “optical” in the sense that the semaphores used to communicate from point to point needed lines-of-sight (like the microwave networks today); that explains why the stations were located in existing high points (mounts for instance) or, even then, in standing towers. Napoléon’s army was a frenetic client of Chappe, and the Emporor put money into the network, so the news about the defeat at Waterloo should have reached Paris before London. But the Rothschild’s pigeons won the race. Why? The fog, dude! On June 18, 1815, in Waterloo, the fog was so thick that Nap’s soldiers were perturbed and the Chappe network completely down: because of the fog the signal couldn’t be sent from Waterloo to the stations in North of France – you couldn’t see anything. Bad luck. That’s an amazing story because fog is still a problem for the new #HFT (microwave) networks, two centuries after the debacle at Waterloo. Technologies may change but nature is still the same.
The outcome of a war has always been a #latency issue.
