Jonathan_S wrote:penny wrote:That is why I suggested it would be like shooting geese with a shotgun. You are bound to hit something. And also why I thought that they are herded into a certain sector of space like cabs and ubers at an airport. It is also why I changed my mind about generally allowing so many DBs to congest in-system traffic by coming in too deeply to deliver and receive data. Think about it. Stock reports change daily! DBs simply don't have the luxury of dilly-dallying around. Time is essentially money to these ships.
I'd actually argue again that the fact that stock reports change daily (or hourly) is a reason why they're not critical to send out on a daily stream of DBs -- because it takes them a minimum of a few days to reach their destination, and more usually weeks to months. What's the good of getting a daily update on someone's stock market when you're getting it 3 weeks later and it'll take another 3 weeks for your order to get back and be executed?
The time delay means that, in my opinion, you either need to entrust some local agent on that planet to do stock trading on your behalf - or you need to follow such a long term buy and hold strategy that daily updates are irrelevant to you.
Heck, about the shortest possible interstellar update time would be Manticore to Beowulf - and if a courier was waiting to jump the instant an update was received, and another waiting to bring the order back immediately and you used hermes buoy FTL comms between the planets and the junction it'd still take about half an hour for an update to get to Beowulf and an order based on it to come back and be executed. That's way better than weeks -- but still loses out badly to traders working from Landing where the round trip might be milliseconds.
You have a point Jonathan. But, again, we are missing HV business classes from the author. I suspect the stock market in the HV is set up to coincide with the current efficiency of travel. Perhaps the market is not open every day. There is also our current limitation of after hours trading. At any rate, that fact can work for an unscrupulous entity even better if said entity has even more time to plan buys for when the market does open.
But to be fair, the entire discussion has been about the MA taking advantage of their faster travel. But the MA would still need to get their hands on the sensitive and classified stock market report that would surely be sprinted to certified DB boats first; which means that the MA would also need to have a certified boat in the waters as well or rely on the report on Manticore and sprinting that report to its non-certified DB and overtaking certified boats which would have a head start.
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