Ken Tanaka didn't trade companies or commodities. He traded **time**. Specifically, the milliseconds it took for the price of the S&P 500 futures contract to travel from Chicago to New Jersey.
His office wasn't Wall Street; it was a sterile, climate-controlled data center colocation cage in Carteret, NJ, nestled among identical cages housing the servers of hedge funds and high-frequency trading (HFT) firms. Ken’s "desk" was a rack of custom-built servers, their cooling fans a constant, low hum. His primary tools: