drew

if you threw a baseball at .9c from a major league pitchers mound, it would still take more time to get to the batters box than the tick-to-trade of some hft firms

Super basic question: how (or, rather, *where*) is tick-to-trade measured? Is it at the network adapter; the CPU; somewhere else? (This stuff is a) fascinating from a nerdy point of view, and b) mildly intimidating for someone from an all-OTC mostly-voice-brokered background)

You can measure it as the time between the ingestion of a mkt data message over a multicast mkt data feed and the receipt of an order ack message over the order entry line, generally both of those messages are timestamped by an internal msg broker that runs on a colocated box