Valuing time distribution

As you certainly understood with this book, HFT fights with time. This is the most critical resource we have to be sure to get our trading models right. Because we send orders that can be executed or not depending on the arrival time, we need to be confident when we build trading strategies that the time we will use to make them fits the time that the exchange is using. We will need to use time-synchronization services to accomplish this measurement accuracy.

Time-synchronization services

Before starting this section, we need to talk about getting precision time. Anywhere in the world, we can have precise time without engineering timing distribution. We use the Global Positioning System (GPS) or the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), as they use atomic clocks.

The Network Time Protocol (NTP) service is one of the most widely used to synchronize the uptime of our computers with a time server. This service has a few layers called strata, as...