In this era of low-latency, high-performance electronic and algorithmic trading, vendors, regulators and business strategist continue to misinform and sometimes disinform industry participants with references to time. Vendors, for example, can selectively manipulate their marketing campaigns to suggest dubious sub-millisecond advantages over competitor technologies. Regulators, who continue their ambitious drive to innovate for the twenty-first century industry changes, may get a bit ahead of themselves when not providing the appropriate clock synchronization context in quoting their temporal constraints. Investment banks and brokerage firms continue to preach the million dollar advantages of millisecond improvements in their trade lifecycle.

The widespread industry shifts in the financial markets have created an unprecedented and collective awareness and sensitivity to small intervals of time. The fact is that despite driving both regulatory and strategic policies, the quoted measure of these intervals remains another piece of misinformation and sometimes disinformation that misleads and confuses industry stakeholders.

In this three part series, I’ll first show examples of time’s importance from a financial market regulatory and strategic perspective. Second I’ll show exactly how and why this time is misinterpreted. Finally i’ll talk about how clock synchronization techniques can be used to better rationalize the measure of time across system boundaries.