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92 sats \ 4 replies \ @Undisciplined 4 Feb \ on: Should Wall Street Lengthen or Shorten Its Opening Hours? (FT, Jennifer Hughes) econ
Most of the issues raised in the article seem silly to me:
- No closing price: so what? Just use the price at midnight (or any other particular time)
- Building out tech & staffing: Are they kidding? My local grocery stores have figured out how to be open 24/7.
- Running the "tape": Again, are they kidding? How is that a real issue?
I don't know what new difficulty exists in "clearing or guaranteeing trades", so maybe that's a real one. It seems like having more time would make it easier to guarantee trades, but maybe not with the reduced liquidity you mentioned (which was the only issue I thought had any merit).
Yeah, not sure. Can't speak to them, really, but perhaps there's more at stake in clearing/settling/figuring out who owns what at any given time than slinging tomato cans on a shelf.
Closing price is weird —like you said, just pick an arbitrary time, or daily average or whatever—and because it exists it causes a lot of unnecessary activity
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My assumption is these 3 points are talking about the tech. They probably have some ancient IBM machines from the 60s that run batch jobs over night. And are anxious to even touch prod code. When the jobs <start running> they assume the data doesn't change anymore.
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That's interesting. Can't you just make sure the new system perfectly replicates the old (or even better that any differences were actually mistakes in the current system)?
Trust me, I get not wanting to do it, from the perspective of whoever actually has to do the work. There's so much money on the line, though, that these kinds of issues don't seem very serious.
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In theory probably yes. In practice they are probably just afraid to touch old code in prod. It's probably also very outdated code that you'd have to refactor in a lot of places.
At least that's my experience with old mainframe businesses. It's just a big headache. And people prefer not making any changes at all or only small atomic changes year after year.
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