History and Evolution of Securities Trading
From paper-based trading in 14th century Bruges, to 20th century trading pits with screaming men and hand signals in Chicago, to today's globally distributed data centers with equipment deployed in immersion cooling tanks, securities trading has been an integral component of the world's economies for centuries. In this presentation, we will review that history to focus on the role of ultra-performant technology in today's nanosecond scale, multi-gigabit-per-second, distributed, yet intimately inter-dependent, world of exchanges. We will review the critical components and data flows to describe how trading actually occurs in today's financial markets. If you thought that distributed denial of service ("DDNS") attacks are a risk only to systems connected to the Internet, you would be wrong. We'll explain an incident which occurred on October 9, 2018 involving the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which was initially investigated by the Japanese National Police Agency as a suspected terrorist-related DDNS attack, and show how the root cause was actually a TCP-level handshake gone wrong.
Optimizing Reaction and Response
We will review how minimizing latency across network devices and cables, within data processing applications, even across the PCIe bus, became an obsession within a small community of technologists within financial services and how this obsession led to both technology and business innovations. For example, today, most exchanges make more money from their data center and data distribution businesses - business which did not exist even in concept twenty years ago - than they do from their core business of facilitating securities trading!
Exporting Technology
We'll close by reviewing how innovations which originated in, or were demanded by, financial services, have significant applicability beyond financial services. We'll discuss how intercepting an network bitstream, and examining its content, in an FPGA can be utilized not just for securities trading but for network-based intrusion-detection and prevention.
