“Greed is good!” – Gordon Gecko
“Bulls. Bears. People from Connecticut.” – Jerry Seinfeld
“Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered.” – Wall Street adage popularized by Jim Cramer
Ask anyone about the stock market, and they likely have an opinion as different as these three quotes. Yet, most individual’s retirement plan, pension or individual investments are likely tied up in Wall Street, The City, Zurich or some other investment hub.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic, WFH and repeated “stimmies” have had another effect: the gamification of day trading. “Retailers” like college students, the unemployed and just the plain bored have changed the market. Reddit and GameStop, anyone? There are no “paper hands” here.
Tech Defines Wall Street
Never has the stock market been as accessible to so many. All made available by tech: smart phones, 5G, cloud connectivity, AI/ML algorithms among others. All of Wall Street, from the global investment banks and hedge funds to private capital and financial advisors, lean on tech like never before.
Something else is different. An interesting trend is popping up. Wall Street has always leveraged tech to drive high-frequency trading (HFT) and algorithm development. Existing partnerships with hardware vendors, IC firms and the like have been useful. However, in recent years Wall Street has started developing their own hardware. Who knew a global investment bank would hire an FPGA developer and system architect?
Why? Latency.
Network and equipment latency can make or break a trade. Microseconds can make the difference between “winning” or “losing”. Off-the-shelf hardware has limitations. So, Wall Street firms, big and small, have been designing HFT-specific hardware platforms all with the goal to minimize latency.
Benefits of Flyover Technology
Low-latency HFT hardware architectures require high-performance signals routed throughout their infrastructure. Similar to data center servers, switches and storage applications, getting signals from the front-panel to an ASIC or another compute engine poses technical challenges.
Samtec Flyover Technology can help extend signal reach and density to achieve next gen speeds by routing signals via ultra-low skew twinax cable versus legacy PCB-based designs.
Samtec’s proprietary co-extruded Eye Speed® twinax cable technology eliminates the performance limitations and inconsistencies of traditional twinax cabling. The results include improved signal integrity, bandwidth, reach and lower latencies for HFT systems.
Please download the High-Speed Cable Interconnect Solutions Guide for more information. Contact Samtec’s technical experts at HDR@samtec.com to discuss specific applications.
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