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The Almighty Buck Science Technology

Neutrino-Powered Financial Trading In Our Future? 275

An anonymous reader writes "In a new feature on the future of high-frequency trading, Wired suggests that neutrino-powered financial trading systems may be coming soon, which would enable extremely low-latency information to be transmitted directly through the center of the Earth between major financial exchanges. If finance becomes the killer app for neutrino communication technology, it may ultimately make Neutrino SETI feasible. Quoting: 'It is only a matter of time, perhaps a few decades, says Alexander Wissner-Gross, a Harvard physicist, before some hedge fund decides it needs a particle accelerator to generate neutrinos, and then everyone will want one. Yes, they travel slower than light, but they indisputably can tunnel through the earth, cutting thousands of miles off an intercontinental message. And just a few days before the Battle of the Quants, right before the bad news about faster-than-light neutrinos, researchers announced they had sent a message by neutrino from the Fermilab accelerator in Chicago to a detector a kilometer away. According to Dan Stancil of North Carolina State University, the signal traveled at "very close to" the speed of light. Unfortunately, the data rate was only about 0.1 bits per second, meaning it would be useless for much more than sending a yes/no signal. "With the right modulation scheme, this could be increased by at least one or two orders of magnitude," Stancil said, adding "I don’t know of a compelling commercial application." But we’ve all heard the (apocryphal) story that Thomas J. Watson of IBM predicted "a world market for maybe five computers."'"
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Neutrino-Powered Financial Trading In Our Future?

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  • Re:Nope Nope Nope (Score:4, Interesting)

    by durrr ( 1316311 ) on Sunday August 05, 2012 @04:37AM (#40884591)

    While we may be able to do neutrino signal trading there should never in the first place be a benefit to super-low-latency trading as it doesn't make the market more "market-efficient" it just enables vampiric that contributes nothing but arcane instability to the whole market. HFTs are a cancer equivalent to too big to fail.

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