The Impact of a Millisecond: Measuring Latency Effects in Securities Trading

In the course of technological evolution security markets offer low-latency access to their customers. Although latency figures are used as marketing instruments, only little research sheds light on the means of those figures. This paper provides a performance measure on the effect of latency in the context of the competitive advantage of IT. Based on a historical dataset of Deutsche Borse’s electronic trading system Xetra an empirical analysis is applied. That way we quantify and qualify the impact of latency from a customer’s point of view.