Just how fast can Wall Street firms trade securities? That's been a defining question in the high-frequency trading universe for years, and the arms race has pushed us to the point where industry players are talking about trades executing within nanoseconds. A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. There are 1,000 nanoseconds in a microsecond, and there are 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond.

The talk has kicked up a notch thanks to the announcement by Tibco Software and its partner Intel that they have repurposed one of its key products for trading purposes, claiming it can execute trades faster than competitors by more than 40 percent. That puts it in nanosecond territory.

Specifically, Tibco announced average end-to-end one-way application latencies of 384 nanoseconds for intra-host communication using shared memory transport and 3.1 microseconds over InfiniBand. TIBCO now claims it is "the first messaging software to break the one microsecond latency barrier--without compromising on messaging features."

Some may quibble with that. At some point, it will want to submit its services for independent testing.

The announcement is significant in that it demonstrates the nanosecond movement is becoming a reality, at least in the labs and from the marketing perspective. But it will be years before nanosecond trades are commonplace in actual trading. 

For more:
- here's a Financial Times article
- here's the release

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