10 Charts That Show The Incredible Power Of Having Economic Information Seconds Before The Rest Of The Market

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Thomson Reuters has been giving elite traders a 2 second advantage on the bi-monthly Consumer Confidence index, a key number for traders. In the past few days, that revelation has angered a lot of people on Wall Street.

A two second advantage may not seem like a lot of time to a human, but to a robot, with the right (read: fastest) connection to a stock exchange, it's plenty of time to spray out thousands of orders and (most likely) cancel them.

That impacts price. Suddenly, the market thinks that a given ETF, equity — whatever you're trading — is really in demand.

But it's not.

When it happens incredibly fast (like, in a second) it can be like a tsunami that rises and then disappears.

Until the correct price is found, what all of that does is simply create a mess — a sort of high speed chaos that can only be seen clearly in milliseconds but can send ripples throughout the market as the tsunami dies down.

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