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An interesting article on LinkedIN from Don Peppers - where he discusses how the ‘speed of light’ rigs the stock market.
In many ways, it has always been the case that getting information ahead of anyone else provides an ‘unfair’ advantage - that is after all how Nathan Rothschild grew his family fortune significantly when his personal network delivered the result of The Battle of Waterloo fully 24 hours ahead of the British Government’s own messengers.
Don is writing about how todays trading floors have been using the ability to trade so fast that they can actually make billions - legally - simply by buying and selling microseconds ahead of your transaction. It has been going on for years. Now, a new exchange is trying to break the model to level the playing field. Click through to read his article, its easier than me reiterating it here, because the point of this piece is an observation.
In the Spring of Last Year I was visiting a business colleague in NYC who is in the process of building out one of the new marketing platforms that are beginning to fill out the marketing space. There are a number of such plays emerging - all attempting to provide a platform to best serve contextually relevant communications, to people like you and me, through the appropriate communications channel, at just the right time, on the correct device. The flip side of the platform is of course that the brands pay more and more money to get more and more precise messaging with higher and higher RoI. Nobody has worked out whether we want to get that message of course. That is a different story, where VRM fits in and might everything above moot.
Anyway - back to the flow. Looking around at his new digs I commented on the cool space - and asked what it was before they had moved in. Oh he said - this was the NYC trading floor for Redacted Bank.
Think about it. The Bank had uprooted a perfectly good trading floor in the middle of NYC to get closer (faster results and transactions) to the exchange. It is worth that much money.
Ironic that in 2015, a Marketing Trading / Exchange company is building itself out on the same floor as a Financial Trading Floor had been just a few years before that. I wonder how long it will be before the marketing exchanges and ad serve companies all start moving to a couple of epicenters in order to process ad bidding and sales micro seconds ahead of the competitor that is two blocks away.