Multicast and the markets with Brian Nigito

In this episode of Signals and Threads, Ron Minsky interviews Brian Nigito about the technological infrastructure of financial markets, contrasting it with the open internet and cloud infrastructures. They discuss the role of exchanges as regulated marketplaces, the evolution from physical to electronic trading, and the importance of fairness and speed in disseminating market data. The conversation covers message types, order books, and the challenges of ensuring reliability and fair access to information for competing participants. They delve into networking technologies like TCP, UDP, and multicast, highlighting the advantages and trade-offs of each, as well as the use of co-location and custom hardware to achieve low latency and high performance in trading systems. The discussion also explores the role of mechanical sympathy in software design and the increasing relevance of specialized hardware in handling high data rates.