Just been reading a report on latency from Inside Market Data – main thing that hit me about the vendor discussions in the report is that they seem to be finding it more and more difficult to differentiate their offerings (aka: come up with much new/interesting to say) when talking about latency and approaching "light speed" physical limits on speed of communication. The Latency discussion seems to be getting commoditised and overdone from a marketing perspective, even if the problem is a real one with money to be made (and spent!).

Best comment comes from the editor Max Bowie, who suggests that (maybe ironically given the content of the report?) that speed is not the only factor behind successful automated trading, echoing something I heard recently that "…if your core trading strategy is only based on being faster at trade execution than the likes of Goldman Sachs, then get a different job…". The "Latency" special report can be found at:

http://www.insidemarketdata.com/public/showPage.html?page=imd_reports