It's very disappointing. I don't expect people to know these things. But on HN, I'd expect them to ask or listen or read about it. Instead people just post about how it's a big finance conspiracy and how they're going to sue everyone...
I don't trade stocks at all, I just played a bit around with crypto for some years. For me it seems, as traditional stock exchanges looks like in stone age compared to the crypto world, when I really need days to make the deal in the background. Also then I don't understand how it needs one one side days to make the deal and on the other side there exist HF traders, who do many, some say as many as 1000 trades per second, maybe, I don't know .., but how does this work.
I remember some years ago, a normal banc transfer needed always 3 working days (so 5 over the weekend). Then came the crypto hype and the time dropped to less than a hour, even for normal people. I wonder if we see something similar here in future.
Also some crypto trading platforms, started to trade with stocks in different forms. I wonder how this will play out in future. I think traditional exchanges have to move forward fast now.
I agree broadly. I think it's just institutional momentum. We could do settlement within minutes for 99% of trades. The only reason we haven't is because 100+ years ago people though 2 days (T+2) was quick and we haven't updated it.
The EU is gradually forcing its members to do T+1 and eventually (I think decades in the future) wants same day for most products. That reduces risk and it makes the market fairer (RobinHood have had cash flow problems they wouldn't have had with T+0 settlement and the big boys don't have to worry about that).
I guess we have to wait. Some of these places are still using COBOL, a language first introduced in 1959!? That's how complex, legacy, under invested etc many back office setups are.
>The only reason we haven't is because 100+ years ago people though 2 days (T+2) was quick and we haven't updated it
T+2 has been around since 2017, not for 100 years. It was T+3 before that in the US. Before computers were in use, I believe it took 2 weeks and was gradually reduced to T+3 during the 70s and 80s.
Stock trading kind of skyrocketed in the late 1960s. It got to the point where the NYSE had to close on Wednesdays just to catch up with the all the trading paperwork from Monday and Tuesday (Thursday and Friday was handled over the weekend). This led to brokerages buying computers to start to manage everything, just in time for trading volume to crash around 1970 and brokerages going bankrupt left and right because of all the computer investments they made.
Would you be surprised to learn that the exchanges switched to using dollars and cents for quotes and trades only in the 1990s? Prior to that it was dollars and fractions of a dollar (like 1/8, 1/32, etc). Strangely enough, all the fractions used were powers of two and thus could be represented exactly in binary. Now that we use dollars and cents, you don’t get IEEE754 floating point representations for all trades. Progress!
Sorry, I'm not blaming cobol. I have a lot of respect for the older languages. Anything that old works, and the people who made it were engineers in the true sense of the word.
