I came across this movie by chance.
I happen to be in the high-frequency quantitative industry, so I quickly download and watch it.
The film is about a series of games and confrontations carried out by high-frequency trading institutions in the United States in order to be one millisecond ahead of their opponents.
The protagonist, Vincent himself, works for a large trading institution, which is mainly used for arbitrage through leading transaction speeds (about 17 milliseconds between Casas and New Jersey). But Vincent wasn't satisfied with a simple, boring job with mediocre pay, so he started a business with his cousin Anton, a tech nerd, to build a fiber with a latency of less than 16 milliseconds.
Of course, the original owners will not let it go. On the one hand, they interfere with their entrepreneurship, and on the other hand, they are also developing microwave signal towers to achieve lower latency.
In the end Vincent succeeded in setting up a 15.7-millisecond fiber, but still lost to the original owner because their microwave towers were faster.
There is a lot of expertise in the entire film process. The final insight is that the industry competition is really bigger than we imagined, and in order to win this competition, we are even willing to send the other party to prison.
The same is true for the domestic high-frequency industry, not to mention 1 millisecond, sometimes even 1 microsecond will cost a huge amount. Everyone is also secretly setting up their own fiber optic lines (nominally not allowed), buying the latest and fastest network equipment, using the most expensive and best speed systems, and some people are even willing to take the risk of some violations. The goal is to get a little bit ahead of the competition.
Yes, this is a winner-take-all field. If you can't make it to the fastest players, all you have to do is get out.
But everyone is still rushing, because as long as you can do your best, financial freedom is only a matter of minutes.
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