Technology

They aren’t using it to complete a trade across it. You use it to send information about what is happening in, say, NY to trade locally in Tokyo or São Paulo before anyone else knows what happened in NYC and adjusts their own trading strategy.

You basically are arbitraging people’s access to information.

They’ve been doing this from NY to Chicago (using higher throughput) radio links for a while. See flash boys.

But if you have sophisticated algorithms moving fast enough in NY to only send the information that is worth trading on, this sounds compelling.

I tend to have a dim view of HFTs - I think they’re more or less just stealing pennies from lots of folks while pretending that’s liquidity, but I’m not an expert.

I am also a licensed ham, and you are right. HF digital modes are very low data rate. A low bits/sec data rate because of the limited bandwidth will result in high latency for any nontrivial message length. FT8 is only 6b/sec for comparison. I'm curious to learn more about how they would use the spectrum.

As a capitalist, this is problematic. Spectrum is a limited and common resource. It would drive the price of spectrum way above what the average organization could afford while providing no benefit over a fiber connection. Meanwhile those organizations that could use the spectrum are unable to.

It's not even particularly innovative because networking over HF already exists. Sure, there is some interesting profiling you could do but it's not particularly new.

That’s plenty of data to trade on. If you believe in efficient markets the priced should be more or less the same globally, you can make a lot of money if you know what the market price in Tokyo should be because you know the price in NY first, or vice versa.