I don’t have knowledge of how Danes may trade stocks, but I expect if they have their own exchange they use the same time as the majority of other stock systems in the world.
As someone else has answered similarly: asset markets don’t optimize for stability because those in the markets don’t make as much money from stability.
As I understand things, then by analogy: stock markets are the casino where people come and play poker against each other, with national economies as the pot. Whether people win or lose, the brokerage houses get their cut, and those who are on the seats at the stock markets.
If the markets were more stable, there might be less trading and the brokers would make less money.
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Nope, that’s for jumping in movies.
Not sure whether you noticed, but Tom Scott touched on this too, last week, though not exactly what you were wondering.
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Denmark is 0.07 seconds behind the world
They’re living in a better time.
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Ok, that was quite intriguing. Going the opposite route of speed by using fiber optic cable in the reverse of what it was developed for.
Fascinating
That’s alright.
I’ve been behind this whole time… THIS WHOLE TIME!
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Couldn’t we just move Denmark a few thousand miles in the air and let time dilation do its thing?
ETA: I’ve been to Pusher St in Freetown Christiania. I know they already have the resources to make this happen.
“Why can’t you just make each timezone run 1/10th faster and then have 10 timezones?”
“Uhgh, Our timezones go up to 11! Got it?”
‘Ok, 11’
“It’s timey-wimeyer, 11 timezones”
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As I understand it, the answer is that markets themselves don’t have agency, for all that we talk about their wishes and decisions like they were pagan volcano gods. Markets are just the outcome of what traders do.
If I am the proprietor of Bob’s Bargain Bund Basement – which you could call a “market” for trading in German bonds – I could decide that bonds will be bought and sold in sealed-bid auctions every 30 seconds. But in the broader sense, the “market” for German bonds consists of any place those assets are sold or even discussed; even if 99% of trade happens at Bob’s Bargain Bund Basement, the prices can still be determined from millisecond to millisecond in any other forum that allows it. And if one trader can get an edge that way, then every other trader will demand it, regardless of whether it’s a good thing overall.
It could just be made illegal to sell anything, anywhere, except at (say) 1-second intervals. But even if governments could pull that off, I think they would prefer to let the system “regulate itself” the way it does now. Which is by maintaining a whole expensive sub-industry, in perpetuity, with mountains of pricey hardware and staff to run it, serving no purpose except to prevent someone else gaining an advantage by doing it first.
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The markets are collections of traders. And the biggest traders are the ones that have the most to gain from high frequency trading. Really it is governments that would have to pass laws to discourage this sort of thing, but politicians today are beholdin’ to the money that the financial industry gives them.
Really, IMHO high frequency trading is just automated “front running.” Which is when you know that somebody wants to buy something, you buy it first and then sell it to them for a slight markup, pocketing the difference and adding nothing to the economy.
This kind of reminds me of the cold war, with rival superpowers trying to get inside each other’s decision loop, until the smallest little diplomatic hiccup can threaten nuclear winter. (See also WW1). But military infrastructure are command economies, so cooler heads can decide to pull out of that death spiral and choose to have a space race instead. There doesn’t seem to be anyone in authority to shape these markets in any less dangerous direction.
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