• Austin Gerig - Chief Data Officer, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

With the advent of high-speed trading, precision timing has become extremely important in financial markets.  High-speed traders require precision timing to monitor their connections and to accurately view the state of decentralized and geographically separated markets.  Regulators require precision timestamps to fully and precisely reconstruct market events.  In this talk I ask two questions: First, is speed necessary in markets?  What are the benefits?  Second, can regulators use precision timestamps for more than market reconstruction, and if so, what else?