High-Frequency Traders Find Microwaves Suit Their Need for Speed

An 800-foot microwave tower in a Belgian cow pasture transmitted messages for the U.S. armed forces during the Cold War. Now it has been enlisted in financial combat, as high-frequency traders fight to shave microseconds off transmission times. Jump Trading, a Chicago-based high-frequency firm, bought the tower last year through a U.K. affiliate called Toren Navo Aansluiting, according to documents filed in the U.K. and Belgium. The company’s name is Dutch for “NATO connection tower.”

Fiber-optic cable used to be the choice of electronic trading firms such as Jump that are locked in a contest to be the fastest. Now they’re adopting microwave technology, which can convey data in almost half the time, to squeeze profit from tiny, fleeting price discrepancies in assets traded around the world. “It really comes down to defending your position,” says Peter Nabicht, a senior adviser to the Modern Markets Initiative trade group and the former chief technology officer at high-frequency trader Allston Trading. “If one person goes to microwave, they have a distinct advantage, so other firms have to go to microwave, too, to maintain their relative speeds.”