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by nostrademons 2707 days ago
...which happens anyway. Starting 5-10 minutes before the official earnings reports come out, investor.google.com gets hammered by bots, requesting every few milliseconds until the actual page is released.

I knew an SRE that wanted to put up a fake earnings report until the official time at which the real one was released, to disincentivize this behavior, but the lawyers nixed that idea really quick.
1 comments
crumpets 2707 days ago
Why didn't they just decide to delay the posting by 30 seconds? It's not like that would deter regular users but it completely eliminates the high speed trading case.
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nostrademons 2707 days ago
Uncertain - I'm not exactly the decision-maker. But I can think of two reasons:

1) They say that earnings will come out at a certain time, so they better be out at that time or else the SEC comes after them. If they just posted earnings as coming out at say 12:00:30 instead of 12:00:00, that just shifts the problem 30 seconds later.

2) The bots will just run for an extra 30 seconds, and will still have the advantage over ordinary people.

(Something I'm not clear on: regular Google - and Hacker News, for that matter - will sometimes just make a user's connection slower if they repeatedly hit it with traffic. Why not use that on bots that hammer the investor relations site? It completely disincentivizes these bots if the 100 requests you made at 11:58:30 mean that you get stuck with a 5 minute delay and don't get the information until 12:03:30. Or maybe they do use this approach and the SRE in question just didn't bother to tell me.)

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crumpets 2706 days ago
Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were referring to the finance information on finance.google.com, not investor information about google itself.

For the latter, companies are not required to release reports on their website in a timely manner. That’s what EDGAR is for.

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richardw 2707 days ago
Accessors who really care would just hit it from multiple IP's? And keep adding distributed IP's until they got what they wanted.
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zorga 2707 days ago
There's nothing you can do to eliminate the high speed trading case short of outlawing automated trading. As long as computers can trade, they'll compete on speed and nothing you do can prevent that. You could forcibly slow down trades to 1 a minute, and you'll still have bots competing on speed to be the first trade each minute and they'll still beat humans.
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