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For a moment I thought the title was talking about my line of work in trading. 100ms would cost more than 100% of revenue.

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I find that hard to believe. If your prediction is wrong any of the time then surely microfluctuations could have chance to revert or move back the other way.

I guess if all you're doing is responding to a value before others have chance to that in theory it's possible you lose 100%; but that seems to require all traders to be lock-stepped on a trading tick.

Can you explain further what I'm missing.

Why aren't trades locked. Is more than, say, 1s resolution really increasing fluidity or making more capital available or is it just a means to extract money from wealth generating activities of others?

You obviously have no idea about how HFT works. 100ms later than your peers and you're out of business. It's a real time auction, if you react too late, the price would most likely have moved against you. If you were trying to buy, the prices would have climbed up higher than your models projected to be profitable, if you were trying to sell, the prices would have dropped.

in general terms, what is the average delay that is tolerable for trading?

Depends on the type of trading, typically <<1ms for sw, <<1us for hw.

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