[HN Gopher] How the transatlantic telegraph cable changed financ...
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How the transatlantic telegraph cable changed finance (2019)
Author : scrlk
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-06-08 11:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tontinecoffeehouse.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tontinecoffeehouse.com)
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| For an accessible book on the history and impact of the early
| telegraph networks I'd recommend _The Victorian Internet_ by Tom
| Standage.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| I heartily second that. It's one of my favorite books.
|
| For anyone curious about it, you can click the Read Sample
| button below the cover image here, or download the sample to
| your Kindle device or app:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07JW5WQSR
|
| If Vint Cerf's foreword and the first chapter don't convince
| you to buy the book, I don't know what will.
|
| Another good read, as many know, is Mother Earth Mother Board.
| It is more about the modern undersea fiber cables, but touches
| on the early telegraph cables too:
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
|
| On my PC, this article says it is for subscribers only. But on
| my phone (Android with Chrome) it loads up just fine. Go
| figure.
| hackernewds wrote:
| couldn't see where to read the first chapter
| gtsnexp wrote:
| Fast forward to today, high-frequency trading shops in Europe are
| investing in software-defined radio and FPGA technology to shave
| off microseconds in trade execution. This quest for speed mirrors
| the impact of the original cable. The core takeaway is simple:
| advancements in communication technology can drastically improve
| market efficiency and connectivity, transforming local markets
| into global ones almost overnight.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Ooh, thats a rabbit hole I want to look into. Do you have any
| good places to start on the whole SDR and FPGA = profit?
| gtsnexp wrote:
| I think most of this is highly proprietary and well-guarded
| know-how. Optiver in Amsterdam was hiring RF and FPGA folks
| not long ago.
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Not quite the educational content you're looking for, but you
| might enjoy the film 'The Hummingbird Project'. It's the
| story of two cousins who work in high-frequency trading
| attempting to lay a perfectly straight fibre optic cable from
| Kansas to New Jersey. It's more about the morals of their
| increasingly desperate and underhanded actions to complete
| the project, but there's plenty of mostly-realistic technical
| scenes too. From memory there's considerations about fibre
| optics vs radio, how to shave milliseconds off those links,
| and of course the engineering challenge of drilling a ~1000
| mile tunnel.
| iamandoni wrote:
| Check out the Sniper in Mahwah blog. Most of this space is
| proprietary, but the author uncovers a lot of the landscape
| from public records.
| kragen wrote:
| nanoseconds sometimes
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Tax each transaction, that'd put a damper on high-speed trading.
| If you want to see the arguments for eliminating HFT, here's the
| central issue, there are others:
|
| > "Former economists for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
| (CFTC) studied HFT firms over a two-year period and found that
| revenue was concentrated among a handful of companies in a
| winner-takes-all market structure. "
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/has-high-fr...
| immibis wrote:
| I've also heard of stock exchanges that added deliberate
| delays.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| That's not an argument for trying to eliminate HFT market
| makers. The competition referenced between HFT market making
| firms that results in a winner take all structure between the
| HFT firms, is a competition to take the bid/ask spread, which
| is something that only HFT firms are trying to do. It should
| not be taken to mean that HFT firms are the sole collectors of
| profits in the markets, but that the best HFT firms out-compete
| the other HFT firms at a very specific type of trading. This
| competition to take the spread between HFT market makers
| decreases the spread and increases liquidity for everyone who
| isn't HFT, which lowers trading costs for non-HFT participants
| in the markets. Prior to the advent of HFT, slippage costs were
| consistently higher, due to how much larger the bid-ask was and
| due to how much less liquidity was present around the bid-ask
| at any given price, which the presence of HFT has helped to
| improve.
|
| https://www.ft.com/content/ff8c6486-cb37-11e3-ba95-00144feab...
| retrac wrote:
| Tangential, but one thing I recently learned about telegraphy was
| that it was one of the final tools, for establishing an accurate
| global map. Taking your longitude requires knowing what time it
| is. An hour's error is 15 degrees of rotation or more than a
| thousand kilometres. Just one second error is several hundred
| metres.
|
| Before the telegraph there was no standard time, not as we use it
| today, where it's the same second in New York and London. And
| synchronizing clocks used to be very difficult. In the 1850s,
| just before the cable, the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, would
| routinely ship chronometers between London and Boston every few
| weeks, to keep the American time standard synced with London, so
| that American ships could use the London-centric longitude
| definitions. And of course, this was back when clocks weren't
| terribly accurate, and a quality chronometer might lose or gain a
| few seconds a month.
|
| In the 1840s, American surveyors started using long-distance
| telegraph links to make longitude measurements in different
| locations at the same time. The distance between the coasts was
| established within a few hundred metres by the late 19th century.
|
| Some more reading:
| https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1897AJ.....18...25S "The
| telegraphic longitude net of the United State and its connection
| with that of Europe, as developed by the Coast and Geodetic
| Survey between 1866 and 1896"
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