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Comment by alasdair_

3 days ago

What would a hedge fund want to do on this exactly? It’s too slow for hft and I’m not sure what they would be doing where ms matter but is not hft.

It's not like there are only two buckets:

1. HFT doing ass-simple arbitrage where only latency matters 2. More sophisticated slower trading taking in deeper signals

Those are two points along a continuum. If you are reacting to an earnings announcement by having an LLM read the earnings release and listen to the call, getting the results a few seconds earlier lets you get your trade in a few seconds earlier. Just because "not HFT" doesn't mean "completely latency insensitive".

  • Exactly that. Except that ultrafast delivers this level of intelligence an order of magnitude faster. So if your competitors automatically react to news articles or financial statements with a certain level of comprehension within minutes, you can now do so in seconds.

There's a lot of trading that isn't proper "HFT", but where speed and latency still matter. Often you'll find this employed more as slippage reduction - i.e you're going to make the trade either way, but making it faster saves you a few bps.

I'm not sure what event-based traders are doing now, but back in the day NLP sentiment analysis was all the rage, so I'm assuming they've now incorporated LLMs too.