[dilandau]

In some markets it is necessary to put the same length of fiber-optic cable between the colocated servers, so that being closer to the exchange's cabinet doesn't translate into an advantage. So obviously we're talking about extremely low latency, high-frequency trading. This carries a huge amount of prerequisites to even get started.

Not only are that, but there are many different order types besides "buy at market price, sell at market price". Then there's options, short sales, and more.

It goes deep. People devote 30 years of their career to this. Read the authors experience as a kind of warning, if you will.

[nv-vn]

Agree to an extent, but not all money in quant finance is generated through HFT. Notably, I don't think funds like Rentec are really doing much to get low-latency [1]. Latency obviously does matter for any kind of quant trading, but to my understanding a good enough strategy + slippage models & the likes can overcome this.

[1] You can find a list of NYSE broker/dealers here: https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/nyse/markets/nyse/members/NY... -- any firm where latency matters will need to be on this list to colo on the exchange.