Legendary Hedge Fund Wants to Use Atomic Clocks to Beat High-Speed Traders
- Renaissance Technologies seeks a patent for anti-HFT invention
- High-speed traders seen as threat, even to biggest hedge funds
Can This App Really Thwart High-Speed Traders?
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Patent application no. 14/451,356 has one goal: to outrun the speed demons of Wall Street.
The 16-page document was quietly published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in February. Replete with schematic drawings, the filing describes a novel way for “executing synchronized trades in multiple exchanges.” The invention consists of not only sophisticated algorithms and a host of computer servers, but atomic clocks -- precisely calibrated to vibrations of irradiated cesium atoms -- to sync orders to within a few billionths of a second.