Not only does MiFID II explicitly require working clock synchronization, many of the recordkeeping requirements cannot be met if time is not verifiably synchronized during the entire trading day. Here’s what you need to know. The Card Players (Les Joueurs de cartes) by Paul Cézanne (Public Domain, Source) The microsecond and millisecond clock accuracy requirements in the…
The default behavior of many clock synchronization systems is to lurch the clock on a leap-second but for TimeKeeper, default behavior is few minutes of speeding up or slowing down the clock (slewing) in order to prevent failures. Lurching or “stepping” on most leap seconds involves repeating a second on the clock. A millisecond clock ticks 23:59:59.999…
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…
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.
Clock synchronization systems are vulnerable to a number of security failures that are exceptionally difficult to address. TimeKeeper has a growing portfolio of security protections to provide a defense in depth at wire speed. The defense in depth approach to security involves multiple levels of protection that support each other to complicate the task of…
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…
Leap seconds have caused tremendous problems with IT systems in the past. The last few 2015, 2012 and 2008, resulted in thousands of servers crashing across the internet leaving several sites (Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, Gawker, Slashdot, Mozilla and Quantas Airlines) out of service for a while. Learn More
NTP can be the basis for UTC traceable 1 microsecond accurate time. Read More
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…