Data Channel: It's About Time

In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Gollum poses the following riddle to Bilbo Baggins:

This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
And causes opportunity to slip by,
So to money, say bye-bye.

The answer, of course, is time. Okay, I may have added a couple of lines, but when it comes to high-frequency trading, time can be brutal, especially when processes take too much of it.

However, time can also be a provider of opportunity -- for example, in the form of accurate and granular time-stamping of datafeeds so that a firm's historical data archive more closely reflects what actually happened in the market, allowing for more precise analysis as firms look to optimize their algorithmic trading models.

Network time services provider Certichron may have had this idea in mind when it teamed up with network infrastructure provider CFN Services to make its network synchronization and time-stamping services available across CFN's Alpha Platform, as did time synchronization systems provider Symmetricom, when it decided to reconfigure its TimeProvider 5000 grandmaster clock to meet the requirements of high-frequency trading firms.

Certichron and Symmetricom are also speeding up time to market for firms choosing to leverage their products, with Certichron's services accessible via a simple cross-connect within a CFN datacenter and Symmetricom's grandmaster clock providing built-in interoperability with firms' Gigabit Ethernet networks and industry-standard small form-factor pluggable (SFP) connectors. 

Datacenter and hosting provider Equinix is also looking to help firms roll out into new markets more quickly and easily, particularly as it continues to grow its presence across Asia-Pacific, by providing its global clients with a familiar face in the region, not to mention access to a number of other well-known vendors providing services from Equinix's datacenters, saving them the time it would take to find new vendors. Equinix has just completed an expansion in Shanghai, and is already exploring other markets in the region where it can set up new facilities.

Although hardware is often cited as a solution for lowering latency, ticker plant vendor Redline Trading Solutions has taken a different approach, moving its acceleration off hardware and onto software running on commodity hardware with the release of the newest generation of its InRush ticker plant. As a result of the move, the new architecture enables the ticker plant to build a full-depth order book in less than 1.2 microseconds, shearing almost four microseconds off the previous generation of InRush.

Meanwhile, S&P Capital IQ is responding to demand for more immediate access to analyst earnings estimates by providing more frequent updates for its Corporate Earnings Estimates product within its Xpressfeed data platform. Rather than once-per-day updates, Xpressfeed now delivers a continuous feed of estimates data, updated every five minutes, which may prove especially advantageous during earnings season.

Although time continually ticks onwards, traders often take a look back in time to analyze what happened in the market or to test how a trading algorithm would perform under past circumstances. They look back in hopes of being able to look forward, to predict what will happen based on historical behavior, which is what start-up analytics provider Lucena Research's technology aims to do. Besides getting ready for the initial release of its own platform, Lucena is also busy building a set of quantitative decision support tools that will be available over the Bloomberg Application Portal.

For now, as I look out the window and see summer drifting away, I think it's about time I get out there and enjoy it -- before time devours it, too.