alt Hacker Newsthere’s a move now towards 24/7 trading. I guess we’ll see how the rigors of the trading environment mesh with zero down time. I’m sure the rollout will be slow and steady.
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Only US. Other markets barely have liquidity during daytime and get most liquidity in opening and closing auctions. Maintenance periods are actually a complication. A few more state transitions for the system, but barely used for maintenance. The only value is for upgrades, which would still be scheduled with the market down and systems up, as participants also need to transition codebases for breaking changes, a test weekend or more is required etc. These systems are extremely resilient. You most often get an incident not because the system is down but because the latency profile has changed by a few ms.
Sports betting exchanges have been doing that for a very long time. There is never a good time to take the system down for maintenance - event settlements happen every few minutes, and live games with in-play betting are going on somewhere in the world at any given time.
Makes things damn hard indeed, because you have to truly learn asynchronicity, CQRS and complex live migrations. (Incidentally, engineers who have worked on such systems tend to be over-represented in extreme HA businesses.)
> there’s a move now towards 24/7 trading.
Isn't the plan more like 23/5 like is already the case for several markets?
I can't see the standard sessions moving more 9:30am/4pm weekdays to 24/7. I take it they'd still let, at least, one hour off for technical reasons.
If I'm not mistaken it's the reason several markets are 23/5 and not 24/5: that one hour of downtime is basically for servers/maintenance right? (maybe someone can chime in)
P.S: I take it technically there's 24/7 trading already seen that cryptocurrencies exchanges are opened 24/7 (I'm not sure: but I think that's the case) but I don't think those do anywhere near the volume of, say, options trading on equities during standard sessions (40 Gbit/s with peak over 70 Gbit/s for the full options feed).
I've seen that. I suspect the exchanges will never go for it for this exact reason -- they need downtime for maintenance. But if does go through, it will be a fun challenge to get 100% uptime!
I've always said that with infinite money we could get 100% uptime, but no one has infinite money. Trading firms are about as close as I can imagine to infinite money though.