You’ve heard the phrase split-second decision?

For high-speed traders that would be akin to the plod of a government bureaucracy or the slow creep of a geological era.

Half a second (splitting it) is 500 milliseconds. One millisecond equals a thousand microseconds. One microsecond is a thousand nanoseconds, and a microsecond is to one full second in ratio about what one second is to 11.6 days.  Fortunately we’re not yet into zeptoseconds and yoctoseconds.

IEX, the upstart protagonist in Michael Lewis’s wildly popular Flash Boys, has now filed to become a listing exchange with the NYSE and the Nasdaq.  Smart folks, they looked at the screaming pace of the stock market and rather than targeting the yoctosecond (one trillionth of a trillionth of a second), said: “What if we slowed this chaos down?”

It was a winning idea, and IEX soared up the ranks of trading platforms.  Oh, but ye hath seen no fire and brimstone like that now breathed from high-speed traders and legacy exchanges.  You’d have thought IEX was proposing immolating them all on a pyre.

Which brings us back to one millisecond.  IEX devised a speed bump of 350 microseconds – less than half a millisecond – to slow access to its market so fast traders could not race ahead and execute or cancel trades at other markets where prices may be microseconds different than IEX’s.

Speed matters because Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) which ten years ago fostered the current stock market of interconnected data nodes and blazing speed said all orders to buy or sell that are seeking to fill must be automated and immediate.

Of course, nobody defined “immediate.”  Using only common sense you can understand what unfolded.  If the “stock market” isn’t a single destination but many bound together by the laws of physics and technology, some humans are going to go, “What if we used computers to buy low over there and sell high over here really fast?”

Now add this fact to the mix. Reg NMS divided common data revenues according to how often an exchange has the best available price. And rules require brokers to buy other data from the exchanges to ensure that they know the best prices.  Plus, Reg NMS capped what exchanges could charge for trades at $0.30 per hundred shares.

Left to chance, how could an exchange know if it would earn data revenues or develop valuable data to sell? Well, the law didn’t prohibit incentives.

Voila! Exchanges came up with the same idea retailers have been using for no doubt thousands of years going back to cuneiform:  Offer a coupon.  Exchanges started paying traders to set the best price in the market.  The more often you could do that, the more the exchange would pay.

Now those “rebates” are routinely more than the capped fee of $0.30 per hundred shares, and now arguably most prices are set by proprietary (having no customers) traders whose technology platforms trade thousands of securities over multiple asset classes simultaneously in fractions of seconds to profit from tiny arbitrage spreads and rebates.  Symbiosis between high-speed firms and exchanges helps the latter generate billions of dollars of revenue from data and technology services around this model.

Enter the SEC in March this year.  The Commission said in effect, “We think one millisecond is immediate.” Implication: IEX’s architecture is fine.

But it’s more than that. Legacy exchanges and high-speed traders reacted with horror and outrage. Billions of dollars have been spent devising systems that maximize speed, prices and data revenues.  The market now depends for best prices on a system of incentives and arbitrage trades clustered around the capacity to do things in LESS than a millisecond. The evidence overwhelms that structure favors speed.

Is a millisecond vital to capital formation? I’ve been running this business for eleven years and it’s taken enormous effort and dedication to build value. I would never let arbitragers with no ownership interest price in fractions of seconds these accumulated years of time and investment.

So why are you, public companies? Food for thought. Now if a millisecond is immediate, we may slam into the reality of our dependence on arbitrage.  But really?  A millisecond?