On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Tom Lane wrote:
> BTW, we were doing full-speed tick data collection and real-time trading
> analysis in the nineties, on machines that my current cell phone would
> leave in the dust. The market data volume has grown a lot since then
> of course, but the price of hardware has fallen a lot more.
Trading volume always grows to where it's just possible to keep up with it
using a well designed app on the fastest hardware available. If you're
always faster than someone else there's money to be made from them using
that fact. The continuous arms race for the fastest scanning and
execution platform keeps volume moving upward in lock step with what
hardware is capable of. The last mainstream news article on this topic
was http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/business/24trading.html
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* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD