Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

I still don't understand why financial systems care about real-time.

They don't. As someone that writes trading systems for a living, I can assure you that none of them are real time. The trick is to be as fast as possible, not to have a bounded worst case. As you say, the occasional miss can be tolerated.

And some of them are *way* slower than being discussed here. A goodly 
number of organizations are still expecting people to be impressed that 
they can get trades out on the same *day* they went in. (I boggle, too, 
but that's the way it is.)