It’s said that time is money, but until a recent discussion with an airline seatmate I’d not realized how far this idea has gone.
I’ve been flying back to NYC to visit with my parents fairly often this past year, and about 25 percent of the time, I chat with my seatmates. This last trip was particularly interesting; sitting at the window was a young man from India, and as he pulled out his laptop I asked him what type of work he does.
Turns out he is a programmer and information systems architecture designer, with a specialty in the financial world. He had done some work for banks in the past, but had launched his own business recently specializing in the development of faster technologies for securities trading.
The global securities market never sleeps and never stops trading. Billions are made speculating on overnight currency fluctuations, international hedge funds, indexed market movements and other such arcane and impossibly complex trading activities. Moreover, most of this trading activity is computer-generated and -controlled. Highly complex computer programs initiate and consummate trades in the many billions of dollars, all without the participation of human decision-making. Humans think and act far too slowly to take advantage of what has become an endless tsunami of speculative trading activity worldwide.
The problem now, it seems, is that today’s computers and the existing trading systems are too slow to satisfy the greed of the market. When $100 billion changes hands amidst fluctuating price oscillations, executing a trade at a precise moment in time can generate profits or losses of millions of dollars. Milliseconds (thousandths of a second) are not fast enough anymore; a delay of milliseconds can erode profit.
So the problem my new friend was working on was one of slicing the moment of “now” into even smaller slices than are possible today. “Now” is a moment, but we cannot define it precisely. We can coordinate our clocks using the oscillations of atomic nuclei to coordinate time, and all agree that noon is noon. However, in the reductionist and materialist view, even “now” has duration; a beginning, a middle and an end. Therefore, it is reasoned, if one can execute a trade closer to the beginning of “now” than to the end, one can slice the market value of time thinner, for a profit.
We both agreed that this materialist approach to time was insane, but my new friend was so intrigued by the challenge placed before him (and for which he flies to NYC every two weeks to meet with those who have engaged him) that he found it irresistible. Even the beginning of “now” has a beginning, middle and end, we agreed, and therefore the process of slicing time into smaller and smaller bits can never reach a conclusion. But for those infected with madness for money, such philosophical contemplation means little; he who slices time smaller stands to gain an infinitesimal yet calculable advantage over others. In the world of profit and loss, such an advantage is worth billions.
I opened my book and he went back to his keyboard and algorithms. And somewhere in New York, a financial services company executive was leaning back in his chair, dreaming of beating his competition to the global betting window by one-tenth of a millisecond.
