How fast do you need your internet? DRW Trading, a Chicago-based investment company, wants to build a 320-metre high mast in Kent that can send ultra-fast messages to the continent. The height — taller than London’s Shard — would mean that its signals are unimpeded by the curvature of the Earth. DRW wants to shave microseconds off the time it takes to get data from, and make trades on, European stock exchanges.
The company is one of the high-speed, computer-driven trading firms known as ‘flash boys’, whose black-box, algorithmic trading engines make money by reacting faster than anyone else to market movements, buying and selling huge numbers of shares at extraordinary speed and hoovering up profits.
In that world, nanoseconds of ‘latency’ — the time it takes to send and receive messages — can be the difference between success and failure. For years, these firms have rented property as close as they can to stock exchanges so that their orders are not slowed down by the time it takes for electrons to move along wires.
This time, however, it is not physics slowing DRW down; it is Sandwich Town Council. DRW’s competitor, Jump Trading, also wants a mast in Kent, and this month, the two global financial houses have engaged in a battle of letters to the planning authorities, trying to woo rural parish councils with the promise of better radio signals.
