Business At Microsecond Speeds – How Fast Can You Go?
Posted by George Huhn on Thu, Nov 19, 2009 @ 12:35 PM
Quantitative financial analysts ("Quants") who design trading algorithms or optimize them to work just a few milliseconds or even microseconds faster are in high-demand these days. Successful trading algorithms often work by taking advantage of millisecond market inefficiencies that aren't widely recognized by other traders. This advantage is lost once other traders discover and begin to trade on the same inefficiencies.
Since the profitable lifespan of proprietary trading algorithms keeps getting shorter, optimizing an algorithm to execute faster is one way to extend its lifespan. So the competition for hiring really good quants that can discover, develop, and optimize new trading algorithms is fierce.
Your business probably doesn't require microsecond decision-making, but the speed and quality with which your business can execute is going continue to become increasingly important. World-wide competition is speeding up innovation, shortening product development times, and reducing product lifecycles.
While many companies are using IT to improve business processes, most of them are just scratching the surface when it comes to using meaningful business analytics to speed up those processes.
When everybody in an industry is using the same IT and business processes, nobody has an advantage. The advantage will come to those who can discover, develop, and optimize business processes beyond what everybody else is doing. That might mean just looking at the little things that everybody else overlooks (or doesn’t think is important) and speeding them up by a few days or even just a few hours. Just as saving a few microseconds is important to a quant, saving those few days or hours could mean the difference between leading in your business or just being one of the pack.
Look around. What's limiting the speed of your business?
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