A Trade in Slow Motion
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An interactive explainer of low-latency trading systems

A Trade
in Slow Motion

Where do the microseconds go between a trade on an exchange and an order coming back? Follow one market data packet through every piece of hardware and software it touches, slowed down until a single cache miss takes seconds.

1
The journeyExchange, fibre, switch, network card and CPU, each drawn to scale, with a running nanosecond receipt.
2
The raceTwo builds of the same trading code on two cores, measured stage by stage.
3
The whyCache misses drawn as trips across the motherboard, packets dropped in a burst, and the code behind it, line by line.
Narrated, with ambient sound. Best with headphones.
Space pause · V narration · M ambience · ← → change act · 1 to 6 jump to an act · H hide overlay · F follow · R replay

A toy example written by an AI assistant, for learning about low-latency systems. It is not related to, derived from or representative of any employer's code, systems or trading practices. The trading logic is deliberately simplistic, and the bundled market data is synthetic.