Basildon, 40 kilometres east of London, is home to the servers of inter-broker dealers, institutional investors and propriety trading firms for whom one-thousandth of a second can mean the difference between making a profit and a loss.
At NYSE Euronext’s data centre, firms rent this space to shave off miniscule fractions of a second to access markets data by being, literally, as close to the exchange as possible. To keep it fair, the cable that connects the individual servers to the host server is always the same distance, so that the time information travels between servers is the same for every tenant. The speed at which orders are executed is beyond human comprehension. Here, algorithms are in charge of executing orders at high speed, often within milliseconds or microseconds. Basildon is just one of many homes for such high frequency trading (HFT).
