0.000350

Three hundred fifty micro seconds – 350-millionths of a second.  It takes 1000x longer than this to blink your eye, but this is enough time to cause months of debate: 350 micro seconds is the size of the speed bump that is at the heart of IEX’s just-approved stock exchange.  In some ways what’s most radical about their proposal is that the speed bump applies to everyone – there is no tiered-pricing offering for faster vs. slower service.  Curiously, one of the arguments against this approach is that it is “un-American” to be the “monopoly” provider of slower vs. faster service.

More about the approval can be seen here, more about IEX can be seen here, and the narrative version of this history is, of course, captured in Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys.