[HN Gopher] Financial systems take a holiday
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Financial systems take a holiday
Author : nfriedly
Score : 61 points
Date : 2024-02-29 19:21 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bitsaboutmoney.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bitsaboutmoney.com)
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Never thought about the fact that holidays are both when there
| are surges of consumer spending but _also_ when money doesn 't
| settle.
|
| Also quite funny that black friday was translated as a sale on
| black things in at least one instance. When I grew up a decades
| ago in east/SE Asia, black friday was not really a thing, but I
| guess times change.
| cgio wrote:
| I love undefined holidays, such as there is a holiday in this or
| that state of this or that country whenever the final of a play-
| off series is to happen.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| ... and then you discover that the problem also extends to the
| supranational level. European countries have holidays, but
| Europe-as-a-whole has holidays too (from the banking
| perspective). e.g. the holiday calendar for TARGET2, which is
| certainly neither the union nor the intersection of the holiday
| calendars of its participants.
|
| Also: I guarantee you that there's a team at every major U.S.
| bank with a crisis management plan ready to kick in when Jimmy
| Carter finally passes: U.S. markets are closed by custom on the
| day of a Presidential funeral.
|
| There's little worse for an ops team than a holiday that you
| can't predict.
| blibble wrote:
| > In an increasingly interconnected world where decisions are
| increasingly made by people who count and value nines, you can
| reasonably expect financial systems to partially close the gap
| between historical practice and contemporary practice of e.g.
| Google Search.
|
| this chap has clearly never worked for a bank
|
| in the 2020s I had to write code to handle files in EBCDIC
|
| I suspect that system producing it will outlive IP, TCP, HTTP and
| JavaScript
| neocritter wrote:
| More likely those will join EBCDIC as anachronisms that survive
| every new revolution in technology.
| baq wrote:
| > We (the financial industry) teleport value through time and
| across space and make this look easy.
|
| I don't know if it's possible to describe finance better in less
| words?
|
| Anyway, if this quote piqued your interest, you should
| familiarize yourself with this author's still incomplete work:
| https://open.substack.com/pub/concoda
| chirau wrote:
| Maybe someone should create an 'international holiday API'
| mawif wrote:
| There are some vendors that do this already, eg
| https://www.marketholidays.com/features-HolidayDataService.a...
|
| From working at places that do electronic trading, most have
| some sort of central db, as well as procedures that mostly work
| for those times when you realize it's a trading holiday or a
| special session Right Now.
|
| What's worse is when timezones/DST changes at short notice,
| because that involves rolling tzdb, or _shudder_ the JVM.
| paulpauper wrote:
| One of the unaddressed problems with a hypothetical 4-day
| workweek is it means financial transactions, mail, processing
| etc. will be even slower and productivity may suffer. Wires and
| will take forever to land, checks take forever to clear, mail
| takes forever to be received
| toast0 wrote:
| If we do T + N -> T + (N - 1) settlement at the same time we
| declare Wednesday a bank holiday, settlement that used to fall
| on Thursday still will, and settlment that used to fall on
| Wednesday will fall on Tuesday instead.
|
| Easy peasy, as long as N is currently >= 2. Changing from T + 1
| to T + 0 is a big switch. T + 0 settlement isn't really
| effected by Wednesday being a holiday in that settling
| transactions isn't delayed, with the large caveat that entering
| transactions is.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Financial systems are inseparably computer systems. Most
| similarly important computer systems don't take holidays. Google
| doesn't take holidays... or doesn't seem to, from the perspective
| of a typical user, at any rate.
|
| Wouldn't it be better for users if our financial systems worked
| like the Google example? Why can't I as a regular retail investor
| trade a stock on Saturday? Why can't I move money from one bank
| account to another on Sunday? Imagine not being able to send
| E-mail on Easter because nobody at your ISP was there to push
| bits around or whatever these banks' excuse is?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because there is a lot more plumbing involved in buying and
| selling equities or moving money than there is to send and
| receive email.
|
| Specifically, a lot of measures to prevent something going
| wrong, because the the damages are far greater when moving
| things of great value than an email.
|
| You technically can trade stock on a Saturday, just not using
| all the aforementioned plumbing of a popular stock exchange and
| brokerage. And you can move money on the weekends, just maybe
| not with the help of banks because they consider it not worth
| their while to offer the service on weekends.
| ryandrake wrote:
| But why? What makes the plumbing stop on weekends and
| holidays? Is this some kind of law of nature, or can it be
| fixed?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't know all the reasons, it could involve regulators
| not wanting to be on call, or more likely, the businesses
| not wanting to be on call. I know that for lots of
| accounting related things, there used to be a need for
| downtime time to tally things up, and maybe that schedule
| carried over.
|
| But overall, I would bet it's just a low demand thing that
| isn't worth it. Suppose you opened an exchange that was
| 24/7. Would the cost to trade on your exchange be
| sufficiently low to compete with the current exchanges with
| limited hours?
|
| Technically, if you had a paper stock certificate, you
| could sell it or buy it, and if you had a bag of money, you
| could move it. But whether or not other people will help
| you is probably dependent on how much you can pay, which
| for 99.99% of people, is probably not worth it to just wait
| a couple days.
|
| Think about real estate. It's possible that you have a
| paper deed and draw up some documents and buy or sell it in
| 30 minutes, but the cost of something going wrong is so
| high that it makes sense to take a little time and use
| lawyers to double and triple check things.
| nottorp wrote:
| If 0.01% of the transactions a bank processes daily need
| some form of human intervention, that's already a full day
| for a lot of bank employees.
|
| Said bank employees would rather have the same number of
| days off we the rest do.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| Then I guess we have to question why those .01% of
| transactions need human intervention at all. It seem like
| .01% of requests to Google Search don't need human
| interaction, why does money, now that it's mostly just an
| entry in a database somewhere (or on its way to be)? If
| it's a matter of approvals, then those should be codified
| in rules that can be expressed in code. That may be
| difficult for laws, the general refrain being 'laws
| aren't code', but money transfer is just a list of rules,
| transactions, settlement dates and so on.
| nottorp wrote:
| > but money transfer is just a list of rules,
| transactions, settlement dates and so on.
|
| Never worked with financial transactions but I have a
| feeling what you said qualifies as 'famous last words'.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| In a lower reply of mine, I still have to ask why this is the
| case. If it's that big of a thing, then there should be rules
| defined to catch things. We have exception handlers for code
| and steps that go awry, why not the same for money, so the
| rest of the money flow can keep going, and only the weird
| things need to be checked out (and further rules then be
| refined).
| mason55 wrote:
| > _Why can 't I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on
| Saturday?_
|
| Markets have chosen to concentrate trading to specific hours so
| as to concentrate liquidity and to help out the professional
| traders. If everyone's trading 24/7 then it means you need to
| be prepared to trade 24/7. Having defined market hours means
| defined hours in which important things can happen. And since
| the people who work in the market can also define the hours,
| they've chosen to give themselves reasonable working hours.
|
| In a world where the major markets are trading 24/7, traders
| need to be at their desk 24/7.
|
| > _Why can 't I move money from one bank account to another on
| Sunday?_
|
| Instant money transfer means instantly draining someone's bank
| account with no recourse. Checks have plenty of opportunities
| to stop the money, so you can write a check on a Sunday as
| easily as a Wednesday. Wires are more irreversible and so you
| can only send those when the bank is open and there's someone
| to double check any suspicious behavior.
| pavlov wrote:
| _> "Why can 't I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on
| Saturday?"_
|
| Stock trading on exchanges traditionally has delayed
| settlement. You don't need to have the money and stock at hand
| when you make the trade, but you're expected to provide them on
| the settlement date. For a long time this was two days later,
| but is now being changed to only one day in the U.S.
|
| Trading on Saturdays would either mean complications for
| settlement, or that settlement must happen on Saturday too.
| Surely not impossible, but these things have ripple effects
| that are not immediately obvious.
|
| _> "Why can 't I move money from one bank account to another
| on Sunday?"_
|
| This exists in Europe with 24/7 SEPA instant credit across
| banks and Eurozone countries. It doesn't cost anything extra.
|
| But getting to that point needed a serious mandate from the
| European Union, years of planning, and cooperation by the
| various governments. The effort was worth it because it's a far
| better solution for consumers than e.g. cryptocurrencies or the
| American proprietary payment solutions like Venmo.
| lmm wrote:
| > Why can't I as a regular retail investor trade a stock on
| Saturday?
|
| Having worked in the industry for some years: because it's
| always been that way, and because the people who make financial
| systems are lazy and bad at their jobs and don't want to admit
| they were wrong.
|
| It's happening, very slowly, just yesterday I was reading about
| "the first 24/7 stock exchange" making another filing or
| something. But the financial industry is conservative and most
| users are happy for it to be - sure they'll talk about how they
| want their bank to have a better online service, but they'll
| keep banking at the big four names they recognise rather than
| the upstarts that offer better service.
|
| > Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because
| nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around or whatever
| these banks' excuse is?
|
| Here in Japan a lot of government systems work like that.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Wouldn't it be better for users if our financial systems
| worked like the Google example?
|
| Yes, I guess there are a few precious hours of our lives that
| aren't crushed under the perversity of the Protestant work
| cult, we should seek them out and grind them under the heel.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| If anything I think it would go in the opposite direction,
| freeing people to do things on their own time, and not the
| banks'. Available when when people need them to be, not when
| the institutions want to be, but that would require effort on
| their part and maybe cost them a few basis points in profit.
| blibble wrote:
| nothing's stopping you swapping your share certificates with
| some random guy in a dark alley for cash/candy/... at 3am on a
| Saturday
|
| if you want to do it on NASDAQ/NYSE/... then those businesses
| have decided they only want to operate certain hours
|
| > Imagine not being able to send E-mail on Easter because
| nobody at your ISP was there to push bits around
|
| emails stuck in a transfer queue somewhere is not exactly a
| rare occurrence
| resolutebat wrote:
| For all its faults, this is the one thing crypto gets right:
| you can trade 24/7.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better if Google worked like financial systems?
| Perhaps people would learn to read maps if they weren't misled
| into unrealistic assumptions that Google Maps will always be
| available, always responsive, always correct.
|
| What is the cost, in money time, attention, engineering effort
| of trying to build for five 9s of reliability?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Assuming banks, and other business or subsystems, are open by
| default is a bit silly when you have to interact with more than a
| handful.
|
| Why not just assume they are not available on any given day
| unless proven otherwise?
|
| A positive list of what's actually confirmed is much better than
| trying to find every obscure holiday everywhere on Earth and then
| adding it to a negative list.
| usmannk wrote:
| > Technologists describe their systems as having "uptime" and
| measure it in "nines", such as "We have five nines of uptime",
| which means that a system has 99.999% uptime or, equivalently,
| about five minutes of downtime per year. Five nines is admirable
| in many circumstances and would be considered _disastrously_
| below expectations for e.g. Google Search.
|
| This seems wrong? 5 9s is probably a reasonable benchmark or even
| unattained goal for Google Search, right?
| bombcar wrote:
| Five nines is about six minutes of downtime a year.
|
| Google search fails _for me_ perhaps about that.
|
| Now to get five nines for Google a bunch of parts below it have
| to be _more_ redundant and reliable.
| resolutebat wrote:
| My favorite set of Google 9s is that Google Cloud Storage
| offers _11_ 9s (99.999999999%) of durability. The
| availability SLO is 99.95% though.
|
| https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/availability-
| durabilit...
|
| https://cloud.google.com/storage/sla
| rtpg wrote:
| To unorientalize the Japan thing here: there's a national list of
| holidays. It is updated once a year. You put it in your code
| base. In the code base there's a comment pointing to the page
| (hopefully one on a .go.jo page)
|
| Your vendor says thing does not happen on holidays or weekends.
| There might be some other special day where things also do not
| happen. Keyword is "training day for staff". Also end of year
| holidays. They will send you an email about it. Maybe 3. You read
| the email (important!), and put it in the vendor-specific list of
| holidays in your code (also important!)
|
| And of course because you like your sanity you use whatever iCal
| date relativity respecting library to do logic like "the next
| Wednesday from today" or whatever.
|
| Some things take 1 step. Some take 5. Being able to do something
| that takes 5 steps without writing a 3000 word screed about the
| world being broken is the sign of a successful person. Document
| it, do it, maybe improve it a bit, move on with life.
| npunt wrote:
| "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the
| unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to
| himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable
| man." -- George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
| doesnt_know wrote:
| I write fund management software and the worst possible
| requirement you can ever read is "on business days".
|
| When you consume data and trade in global markets, figuring this
| out is non-trivial and usually process specific.
| highwayman47 wrote:
| No, leave the trading hours as they are now.
| aj7 wrote:
| " Many people and businesses find it inconvenient when financial
| systems are down. It also seems unnecessary."
|
| They make money on the float when money doesn't move. They make
| money by efficient compression of business with fewer workdays.
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