[Zuikaku]

Unless you are someone who keeps all your money in physical cash and drives cars for a living, there is no way HFT is less important than traffic lights; one keeps the economy of the world flowing, the other stops people getting driving tickets.

"Being a second off and resynchronizing next time" could be a million dollar difference, there is no way that you can shrug that off.

As a developer for a financial firm, this leap second is an extremely big deal; the fact that this is the first time in history that financial markets (which are normally millisecond accurate) have had to deal with this phenomenon will absolutely result in something somewhere going wrong.

This article isn't exaggerated; it's there to highlight what's going on for the traders and brokers who aren't technologically advanced.

[michaelt]

  there is no way HFT is less important than traffic lights
  one keeps the economy of the world flowing, the other 
  stops people getting driving tickets.

The New York Stock Exchange is closed for 17.5 hours each day, and the entire weekend. I doubt the world economy is going to stop flowing if they're closed for an extra second - or even if a few people take their systems offline for several minutes to restart them.

[brobinson]

Stocks are a very, very small part of the financial markets. Forex and futures markets are open most of the week and a lot more money flows through them. Forex alone accounts for about five trillion USD per DAY of money movement. Stocks are barely a blip on the radar in comparison.

[kasey_junk]

And yet all of the major exchanges have mandated down times that even small e-retail operators would kill for.

This thread has reached sort of silly proportions. Of course electronic trading impacts most people's lives even if they don't want it to, but in reality the markets are largely self correcting at this level, so even if there is some oddity associated with the leap second it likely won't have long term (or maybe even observable) impact on the wider world.

[brobinson]

Agreed on all points!

[saiya-jin]

> ah yes, the usual "HFT is the best invetion since wheel and fire" mantra...

again, same question - who cares? apart from some already super rich HTF guys.

> "something somewhere going wrong" - um, this is practically constant situation for quite some time, in or out of markets. But don't let my relaxed monday mood disturb your doomsday freaking out :)

> This article isn't exaggerated; it's there to highlight what's going on for the traders and brokers who aren't technologically advanced.

traders and brokers who do actual trading and not HFT will not be affected directly by that (ie their books), it's more like a sidenote that "if you see some blip in feeds during that time, this might explain it"