Inside The Most Important Building For U.S. Capital Markets Where Trillions Trade Each Day
By Tyler Durden
Ask people which is the most important structure that keeps the US capital markets humming day after day, and most will likely erroneously say the New York Stock Exchange, which however over the past decade has transformed from its historic role into nothing more than a TV studio for financial cable networks. Some might be closer to the truth and say that the most important building is the true New York Stock Exchange located in Mahwah, New Jersey however that also is not true as the NYSE now accounts for just a small fraction of total traded volume.
No, the real answer of what the most important building if for US capital markets, and not just stocks, but all assets classes, as under its roof on a daily basis electronic trades representing many trillions of dollars’ worth of equities, derivatives, currencies, and fixed-income take place, is the Equinix NY4 data center, located at 755 Secaucus Road, in Secaucus, NJ 07094.
This, as Bloomberg puts it in its fascinating profile of this particular structure, “is where Wall Street actually transacts.”
Behold what the new trading floor looks like: This view from a catwalk shows some of the miles of fiber-optic cable that connect to machines below.
Photo: Bloomberg
The first thing that any entrant in this giant, semi-refrigerated warehouse containing millions of servers will notice is that there are virtually no humans to be seen anywhere. Yes: the Equinix’s NY4 data center hosts 49 exchanges (among the customers that pay to use this Secaucus location) and it is all just servers and fiberoptic interconnections either between them, or to the outside world.
This is how Bloomberg introduces this new nerve centre of virtually every capital markets in the US: “six miles northwest of the New York Stock Exchange as the microwave flies, across the Hudson River and within earshot of Interstate 95, is a building with no name. Only three numbers mark its address, and, like much of its surroundings, it’s nondescript, encircled by windblown trash and lonely semitrailers waiting to be hauled away somewhere. It’s a part of New Jersey that’s, well, ugly.”
That’s not a coincidence: the building wants to attract as little attention to itself as possible because it happens to be the most critical node in the U.S. financial system. “The 49 different exchanges that lease space at this data center sent a record 9.6 million messages per second through its fiber-optic cables in February. Every day, electronic trades representing trillions of dollars’ worth of equities, derivatives, currencies, and fixed-income assets pass under this roof. This is NY4.”
NY4 is just one of the core assets, or “crown jewels” of Equinix, the $22.7 billion company that’s quietly grown into the world’s largest owner of interconnected data centers, which really is a fancy name for warehouses.
The full public technical specs of this vast building are below:
However, Equinix pitches its centers as more than just storage space for servers.
As Bloomberg reports, its clients pay in part because …read more
Source: Inside The Most Important Building For U.S. Capital Markets Where Trillions Trade Each Day
