Leapsecond 2016 complete

You can see that Google starts its 20 hour leap-second “skew” 10 hours before the event and then skews back to the real time. Everyone else stays correct and then has a short error as they “leap” the second and then come back into correct time. A close look shows that a few minutes passed…

Leapsecond Eve 2016

Around 2PM UTC, Google’s time starts to veer off in preparation for the leap second. Everyone else is reasonably solid. The base time here is provided by GPS. Time sources being monitored in parallel include several NIST sources, the Canadian time source (tac.chu.nrc.ca), Google, Apple, USNO, GPS and a local PTP source.

Time out of joint

Fincial trading venues and trading systems operate so quickly and rely on clocks so deeply that events like the one noted in this FINRA report are more common than many understand “Of the five commenters that supported tightening clock synchronization requirements at least to some extent, all agreed that a millisecond standard is necessary given…

Minimizing Spend on MiFID II Compliance

A customer recently pointed me at a series of blog posts about a project at a financial firm trying to comply with MiFID II clock regulations without TimeKeeper and “with minimum spend”. Reading the posts, it’s clear that costs are already well over what it would have cost them to buy TimeKeeper and they have…

MiFID II 100 microsecond time sync on Windows with TimeKeeper and Mellanox

Accurate time on Microsoft Windows is easy to achieve when using TimeKeeper software and Mellanox ConnectX network adaptors. The most stringent of the MiFID II clock synchronization requirements of 100 microseconds can be met without changes in infrastructure, exotic protocols (such as PTP) or dedicated hardware. Many TimeKeeper customers operate clocks with a better than…