“IF EVER you wanted to set your watch, now is the time.” Leon Lobo, of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL), stands before a rack of servers near Canary Wharf, London’s eastern financial outpost. The rack holds a high-precision, caesium atomic clock—the most accurate sort on the planet—and two other digital timepieces, called “grandmaster clocks”, that work alongside it. Ticking in synchrony, all three display the time to within a whisker of co-ordinated universal time (UTC), the world’s absolute standard.
The purpose of this high-tech horological trio is to tell banks and trading services exactly what the time is, so that they can comply with a new set of accounting rules, called the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, which are being promulgated by the European Commission and will come into force in 2017. Among many other things, this directive drastically tightens rules on the time-stamping of transactions. That tightening is needed to give a better account of who did what and when in a world where market crashes can happen in a flash. Dr Lobo and his colleagues therefore met, on October 28th,...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1GyPFnh
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