High Speed Communication

How the first ever telecoms scam worked
Tom Scott
I've heard about people paying to run their own private optical data line from their office to the New York Stock Exchange in order to get their financial information a few nanoseconds quicker than the next guy. I suppose that's okay if it makes you some money, but it sounds pretty risky. It's going to take a chunk of change to get the line installed, and then the trades you are going to be making are going to be based on miniscule changes in price which means you are going to need big blocks of cash to spend on these trades. That's all fine and well as long as the stocks (or bonds or whatever) are trading within a predictable range, but if a big wave sweeps through the market all those gains could be wiped out in a heartbeat. That's okay, some people thrive on taking extraordinary risks. Everybody accepts some risk, it's what makes life worth living, but most people aren't adrenalin junkies.