Embedded Files
Throughout the movie, high frequency trading them is relied on. The entire purpose of Vincent and Anton's project of finding a way to make trading 1 millisecond faster completely relies on technology. To achieve this goal the computers must do is it exactly as they're specified to do in these algorithms must be reliable. An example of computer reliability Is when it is narrated how in the past Standard & Poor downgraded America's credit rating from AAA to AA+, that the markets in the U.S. as well as international plummeted [1].
In the real world, high-frequency algorithms have shown that while they can make large sums of money, they are overall not reliable. This is seen through the 2010 Flash Crash. The crash originally began when a large selling order was made when the market was already fragile as a result of the fragile market in Greece. When the large selling order was made, because of the way that the high-frequency algorithms work, they saw that the market was decreasing and they all sold because they believed the market was going down. The reason for this was because the algorithms are mostly based on the notion of buy low sell high. Because of the pure abundance of sales, the market value did decrease. What is interesting is that the algorithms did what they were supposed to do, the algorithms weren't defective they just misread the market.​In numbers, by 2:30 the Dow lost almost 1000 points and was only able to recover 600 by the end of the day. The S&P 500 volatility index skyrocketed by 22.5%. By the end of the day, the market indices and futures were down by a total of 4% and the market value decreased by 1 trillion dollars [2].
An interesting example of computer reliability has to deal with Anton using optical regenerators. When Anton realize that these optical regenerators have a large enough tolerance to the distance the information could travel, he realized that he would be able to use fewer regenerators to cut down on time. While the company says this is a risky approach, Anton believes that by spacing out these regenerators he would be able to cut down the number of regenerators to 154 which would cut down enough time to reach his end goal of 16 milliseconds. Because of how reliable this technology is and as a result of its large tolerance, this is possible [1].
Anton studying the back of the optical regenerator as he prepares to research the tolerance
References
[1] Nguyen, Kim. The Hummingbird Project. (Belga Productions and Item 7, 2019). (accessed 9/21/2021).
[2] James Chen, High-Frequency Trading (HFT), (IAC Publishing, August 25, 2021), https://www.investopedia.com/terms/h/high-frequency-trading.asp (September 20, 2021)
Cover Photo: https://www.teksystems.com/en/insights/article/site-reliability-engineering
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse