I guess the problem is that the arms race needs to reach a bottom at some point. Sure if prices lag around the world by a few hours, then I can see how it's bad. Here we're talking about boring holes through mountains to shave microseconds off.

Then you see articles that these ones that make my blood boil: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-12/global-wa...

> Melting Arctic Means New Undersea Cables for High-Speed Traders

Amazing!

I can't shake the feeling that there can't be a simpler and more elegant solution to this problem, such as settling all transactions on some global discrete "tick" on the scale of a second to let the time for all exchanges to settle on a shared view of the market. The problem is that the incentives right now are not to create such a system, but rather to lay wires in the arctic to trade between Tokio and NY few milliseconds faster.