Ping times to foreign data server

[PocketChange]

Good old article, however, trading is a bit of a hybrid.

If you are staging orders on the exchange order books latency is moot. Your quotes and order updates are subject to latency but your pending orders rest and process directly on the exchange servers.

If you are placing market orders from your PC latency applies.
Quotes are subject to latency. If your using broker simulated order types... ie trailing stops these orders rest on your broker's servers subject to their latency to the exchange.

Quote from tradecalm:

The best article on the internet that answers all questions regarding ping time.
Once and for all. http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/Latency.html

Look at this as well: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

 

[joe4422]

Seriously, you're wrong. Have you ever traded over seas? I don't care if you have the fastest connection in the world. If your bandwidth is low, the data gets squeezed and trickles in. I don't doubt that you can connect with a dial up, so long as that dial up has bandwidth. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about, because maybe I'm using the wrong terms.

Let's say you have a dial up and you're running IB TWS on it. You then connect 10,000 computers to that same dial up connection, and run IB TWS on all of them. What's going to happen? You're bandwidth is going to be squeezed and it won't work. Do the same thing with a super fast DSL, and guess what? You're bandwidth will be squeezed and it won't work. Especially developing countries tend to pile as many customers as they can into the same line, which gives bandwidth issues. The speed is okay for normal websites, but streaming data gets bottle necked.

Quote from dcraig:

Very misleading stuff.

Of course latency matters. Especially over intercontinental distances. Distance and number of hops to your destination determine ping time - your ISP has little influence over it. Your bandwidth requirements depend on what you are using it for. For example if you are using IB TWS, your bandwidth requirements are quite low. You can even run the thing over dialup.

 

[dcraig]

Quote from joe4422:

Seriously, you're wrong. Have you ever traded over seas? I don't care if you have the fastest connection in the world. If your bandwidth is low, the data gets squeezed and trickles in. I don't doubt that you can connect with a dial up, so long as that dial up has bandwidth. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about, because maybe I'm using the wrong terms.

Let's say you have a dial up and you're running IB TWS on it. You then connect 10,000 computers to that same dial up connection, and run IB TWS on all of them. What's going to happen? You're bandwidth is going to be squeezed and it won't work. Do the same thing with a super fast DSL, and guess what? You're bandwidth will be squeezed and it won't work. Especially developing countries tend to pile as many customers as they can into the same line, which gives bandwidth issues. The speed is okay for normal websites, but streaming data gets bottle necked.

I really don't know what you are on about. Your line speed (eg ADSL, cable, dialup whatever) is just the speed to your ISP. After that things depend on your ISP infrastructure, peering arrangements etc. If the pipes are too small and there is congestion etc, which may of course be the case, then you could experience delays, but that is largely independent of your local speed for low bandwidth requirements such as TWS.

And yes I do not trade from the US or Europe. I do have 20Mbps ADSL but I could do with far less bandwidth without it having the slightest effect.

 

[jharmon]

Round trip ping times from West coast USA to:

Australia (Sydney):
Singapore: 205ms
Hong Kong: 200ms
UK: 130ms
Germany: 155ms
East Coast USA: 35ms

Round trip ping times from East coast USA to:
Australia (Sydney): 210ms
Singapore: 250ms
Hong Kong: 220ms
UK: 100ms
Germany: 125ms
West Coast USA: 35ms

Note that these do make quite a big difference in order routing. For example, if you are in New York trading Singapore:

1. Send order to platform (250ms)
2. Check available funds, send order into market, waits for confirmation it is placed into market (30-60ms)
3. Send back confirmation order is placed (250ms)

You will be waiting around 0.6 seconds before you see any indication your order has gone through.

It really depends upon the instruments and frequency of your trading though.

I know a lot of traders. I know of only a handful of successful traders that do any sort of "high frequency" trading where sub second response is required. And those traders have significant IT staff support behind them to make it happen too.

 

[moarla]

i was connected (i am sitting in Italy) to IB US server when i opened the account (i did choose the wrong server).
Si i had many disconnections and reconnections all day long. I asked IB an they told me that thrue the JAVA applet they check every x seconds the ping time and if it falls below a certein time, the server disconnects the user.
IB told me you should not have ping time to the IOB server over 170 - 180ms.

So the solution was to connect me to the server in Switzerland.
my ping time to CH is around 40ms

After that i had not even one problem again with connection.

(and for that IB has also a server in Asia)