Introducing the Canadian movie "The Hummingbird Project" today.
Title The Hummingbird Project (2018), alias The Hummingbird Project.
This Canadian film focuses on the financial world of Wall Street. A pair of high-risk and high-frequency trading operators want to make a lot of money with their ideas. They resign from the original securities company and find VCs on their own, ready to make a big splash.
The important background knowledge in The Hummingbird Project is high-frequency trading. In order to take care of the audience who lack relevant financial expertise, a laywoman bartender was arranged in the film to take the audience to understand the relevant background knowledge.
The characteristics of high-frequency trading are the use of high-speed and complex computer systems for transactions, and the transactions are directly connected to data channels, just like the optical fiber direct connection or signal tower connection shown in the film. The average holding time in high-frequency trading is very short, and users send and cancel orders in large numbers. This imposes strict requirements on network latency. The lower the network latency of the exchange, the more able to complete the order first, thus earning a fee.
The two traders in the film are cousins Vincent and Anton.
Vincent is played by Jesse Eisenberg, who played the bald Luther, this time he is no longer bald.
He has a lot of ideas. Seeing that his company is struggling with 17 milliseconds of latency, he is under the strong leadership of an angry strong woman boss every day. Suddenly, he decides to start his own business and build a direct connection fiber to reduce the delay to 16 milliseconds. . This can make a lot of money, but also angry with the old club.
Anton is played by the famous long-legged "Tarzan" Alexander Skarsgård.
Originally, he was a beautiful man with good looks in the movie. Here he plays a computer geek who is not good at words, and if he is bald, he will be bald. In fact, we can understand for the needs of the plot, but geeks can also be very handsome, not necessarily the image of a bald and fat house. There are shots of Alexander taking a bath in the film, but he can't see his body.
Anton is responsible for writing the code, exhausting all methods to design a trading system, desperately optimizing and simplifying the code, researching hardware equipment, and combining the hardware system to reduce the transaction delay to 16 milliseconds.
How fast is 16ms? About the same as a hummingbird flapping its wings once.
16 milliseconds is only 1 millisecond faster than 17 milliseconds, don't underestimate this 1 millisecond. The difference of 1 millisecond is the difference of thousands of transactions. Anton has calculated a small account, and the advantage of 1 millisecond can bring billions of annual benefits.
In order to achieve the goal of 16 milliseconds, the brothers broke ground and built a 2,000-kilometer direct optical fiber.
Vincent relied on his three-inch tongue to sell this huge project to the angels, and got tens of millions of investment. Then, day after day, digging trenches and laying out optical fibers and writing code, the brothers blocked everything they had on this project.
I have crossed mountains and seas, and crossed crowds of people. I used to have everything, and it was like smoke in a blink of an eye.
When all the dust settles, if Vincent can understand Chinese, he will definitely feel a lot when he hears this "Ordinary Road".
Vincent led the construction team to break the ground, cross lakes and swamps, and talk to the owners of residential houses in various places. The purpose is to build a straight fiber optic channel.
After the construction is successful, the measured network delay is 15 milliseconds. The brothers won the project but lost the entire market.
The reason is that direction is more important than effort.
Vincent is more like a gambler, his vision is only within the scope of his own eyesight, and he lacks the vision beyond the times. Within the scope of the existing technology, he chose a seemingly simple route that was not easy to implement. The project cost was huge and the risk was also high. He tried his best to reduce the network delay by only 6% at the current technical level.
He's making a big bet that other competitors won't be able to develop a newer generation of technology in that time. Sadly, his gamble was lost. The competitors he needs to face are not only the old club, but also the universities that study network communication technology. When someone in the university developed a new generation of technology, the sharp-smelling brokerage exchange immediately transformed the technology into productivity, reducing the delay to 11 milliseconds in a very short time, an increase of 36%.
Both Vincent and Anton were busy working, but neglected to look up at the road. When the efforts are in the wrong direction, even if you are half tired, you will not be able to achieve the expected results.
The stomach cancer of Chinese Center and the arrest of Anton in the film all herald the fate of this project. In life, the brothers struggled desperately with little success, and equally on projects, they were in an ineffective and dying struggle. Such struggles are ineffective but comforting, and nothing more.
Vincent and Anton neglected to look up at the road, and even ignored the scenery on the side of the road. When they were finally able to calm down and think carefully, they suddenly realized that they had missed a lot.
How much time does not have,
Direction is more important than effort.
This is the distribution center for hardcore movie fans, welcome to pay attention to the public number: Miaokan Film and Television
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