Wall Streets Need For Trading Speed: The Nanosecond Age [View All]

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By Brendan Conway

Wall Street is seeing the rise of the nanosecond.

London-based trading technology company Fixnetix said Tuesday it has the world’s fastest trading application, a microchip that prepares a trade in 740 billionths of a second, or nanoseconds.

A nanosecond is so short a span of time that the blink of a human eye takes hundreds of millions of them.

The fastest computer-executed algorithmic trades are often measured in microseconds, which are millionths of a second. The nanosecond barrier has come into view in recent years as hedge funds, investment banks and proprietary trading firms spend millions to shave ever smaller slivers of time off their activities.

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http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/06/14/wall-streets-need-for-trading-speed-the-nanosecond-age/