Trading requires imposing an absolute ordering - not an absolute time. You could specify order with UTC time-stamps I guess, but still you'd want a central arbiter to provide those time-stamps. Otherwise you'd need an honour system to settle trades - which surely would be open to abuse?
Posted Jul 4, 2012 17:56 UTC (Wed) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262)
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You only need an ordering at the matching engine. But most participants in the markets are not running matching engines. For measuring the age of quotes and your network latency and your software latency and the latency of messages from the exchange and the latency of messages from other sources and numerous other measurements you want accurate (definitely sub-0.1s!) timestamps, that agree across multiple organisations.