Market Traders

Milliseconds Matter in the Financial Markets

For market traders, even the slightest delay can result in significant financial loss. NTP servers provide the microsecond-level accuracy required for time-stamping trades, enabling traders to execute orders with confidence and maintain compliance with stringent market regulations.

Market trading involves individuals and firms buying and selling equities (stock traders), currencies (Forex traders), or other financial assets. Regulations in the United States and Europe- such as OATS, FINRA, and MiFID II- mandate that all stock market transactions be timestamped with clocks synchronized and traceable to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). These reference clocks are maintained by national metrology institutes such as NIST (USA), PTB (Germany), and NPL (UK).

Over the past decade, industry has steadily shifted toward achieving increasingly accurate timestamps via network-based time synchronization. Initially, the Network Time Protocol (NTP) was widely adopted, providing typical client accuracy between 0.5 to 2 milliseconds. However, as precision demands grew, the Precision Time Protocol (PTP / IEEE-1588) became standard, offering synchronization accuracy down to 100 nanoseconds. PTP is now required to meet stringent timestamp accuracy standards of 100 microseconds for certain classes of trading.

High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and Timing Demands

One specialized class of traders- High-Frequency Traders (HFTs) engages in algorithm-driven, high-volume, short-term trading strategies. HFT firms execute thousands to millions of trades per second, constantly pushing the limits of network timing accuracy.

To minimize latency, HFTs physically co-locate their trading systems just meters from the market’s core infrastructure. This proximity allows them to access market data milliseconds or even microseconds faster than other market participants, providing a significant competitive advantage. Despite their speed, HFTs must also comply with stringent timestamp accuracy requirements under FINRA and MiFID II.

Implementing PTP / IEEE-1588 for Precise Time Synchronization

HFT operations require precise UTC synchronization to accurately timestamp every buy and sell order. Typically, each trading environment runs multiple high-speed computing systems connected through a dedicated Local Area Network (LAN). A PTP Grandmaster Clock within the LAN provides the synchronization source, with each computer clock aligned to the Grandmaster.

Precise synchronization across all nodes is essential for parallel processing of market data and to ensure both regulatory compliance and algorithmic performance. Accurate timestamps play a crucial role in transaction ordering and market data integrity.

Achieving Traceable and Resilient Timing

Our time synchronization solution is specifically designed to meet the emerging timestamping requirements of financial markets and HFT environments. At its core, the system integrates a highly stable onboard oscillator that generates base synchronization signals distributed to all I/O modules.

In the event of losing all external synchronization sources, the system seamlessly switches to holdover mode, maintaining required time accuracy for a defined period. Depending on the oscillator option chosen, holdover performance can extend up to 140 days, with a maximum phase deviation of 100 microseconds.

High-Precision Synchronization Platform (HPS)

The High Precision Synchronization (HPS) unit delivers a future-proof foundation for both IEEE 1588 (PTP) and NTP infrastructure. Key features include:

High-performance processing with 1-step master clock capability
1GE interface with SFP slot, supporting large PTP client deployments
Synchronization of thousands of IEEE 1588 slave devices or NTP clients across IPv4 and IPv6 networks - ideal for transaction servers running HFT applications

For NTP-based synchronization, each network interface can operate as a carrier-grade NTP server with 8 ns timestamp accuracy, handling up to 10,000 NTP requests per second per port.

PTP scalability includes support for:

2,048 PTP Slaves at full unicast rate (128 Sync / 128 Delay Requests per second)
250,000 Delay Requests per second in Enterprise Profile / Hybrid mode

This architecture ensures robust, scalable, and regulation-compliant time synchronization, empowering financial firms to maintain competitive advantages while meeting the most demanding timestamp accuracy requirements in global markets.