High-Speed Stock Traders Turn to Laser Beams
It is the latest salvo in the “race to zero,” traders’ term for their efforts to whittle away the difference between the speed their orders travel at and the speed of light. Zero, the point at which that difference would disappear, has become a kind of holy grail to computerized traders, for whom nanoseconds-billionths of a second-can spell the difference between profit and loss in their algorithm-driven trades…
