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jen20yesterday at 4:53 PM4 repliesview on HN

One option is to add a random delay to every trade, thus making high speed arbitrage substantially more difficult.


Replies

drob518yesterday at 7:17 PM

I suspect that randomness of some sort is the only way. Without that, whatever the rules of the game, there is a way to somehow get a slim advantage. You can make the advantage small and the costs to try to gain it large, such that it isn’t cost effective to try, but as we’ve seen with HFT, it’s amazing how much people will spend to pick up pennies. Even a tiny gain, exploited frequently enough can be quite profitable.

immibistoday at 6:40 AM

Or even a fixed delay. Imagine trading with one month delay - You'd have to bid what you think the stock is actually worth, not what you think everyone else will think it's worth in five milliseconds. That's extreme, of course.

graycattoday at 6:26 AM

> random delay

A Poison process. Just specify the expected value. E.g., if the expected value is 5 seconds and have gone some hours without an event, then the expected time is still 5 seconds.

E.g., like the time to some radio active delay and whatever its expected value to decay is.

ukd1yesterday at 4:58 PM

Another is to reset the clock on the auction each change