NTP.
By any other standard, most manually set clocks are up to a full minute off all the time.
By any other standard, most manually set clocks are up to a full minute off all the time.
MiFID 2 alone forces sub-μs precision. Million times less than the leap 1 second.
NTP minute away is good for displaying date on the workstation, not for many of the devices that are critical to the modern world.
Some MiFID reports require microsecond or perhaps nanosecond precision, but that's really just a formatting requirement "please write your timestamps with six figures after the decimal point."
It's not "something like 100μs", it's 100 times less: 1μs.
From a convenient QA:
> Algorithmic and high-frequency trading (HFT) firms must timestamp to 1 microsecond (μs) accuracy, synchronized to UTC. For venues and systematic internalisers executing algorithmic strategies, this microsecond-level precision is non-negotiable. Other investment firms trading on venues must achieve 1 millisecond (ms) accuracy.
No, precision means actually precision, not a length of a number.
Sure they have their own time servers fed from the GPS, but they need to be _accurate_ in relation to the world.
But timestamps used by companies forced to use very accurate timing must be synchronised to UTC.