HF Trading & HF Radio

Like peanut butter & chocolate.

Directing article at The SWLing Post, and the main article at, uh, some guy in Chicago's blog.  The bottom line is that a tech guy from the Chicago financial scene was out biking and spied some long-range shortwave beam antennas pointed in the general direction of western Europe on the same tower as a local microwave link pointed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  Hmm.  From the blog post:

Shortwave is no panacea.  It's unreliable, expensive, and very low bandwidth.  Think dialup speeds.  But you can't beat it for latency.

You bet it can't be beat.  For a straight-line path at the speed of light, 6000 miles to Europe at 186 miles per millisecond comes out to 32 ms travel time.  Though fiber optic, this would be about 47% slower, so make that 47 ms.  Additionally, while the fiber optic may be somewhat directly routed, it can never be exactly a straight line.  Call it at best taking the square way around a block vs. the diagonal.  That's another 41%, which brings us up to 66 ms, which is more than double the shortwave transmission time.  Throw in delays caused by in-line amplifiers, routers, etc. and it's going to total to quite a bit more.  But just going with the original numbers, is 34 ms enough to matter?  Not to me, no.  But yes, to some people I can imagine this would be important.

Thales (pretty much the first scientist ever) was right: Science can be useful, and even make it fairly easy to make money.  Throw in the whole "figured this out while biking" angle and it makes quite an appealing story.