The year is 20XX. The market has been improved to perfection.

Market makers have integrated with exchanges to craft the ideal infrastructure and regulations for maximum liquidity and efficiency.

Trade limits have been abolished, allowing market makers to turn over volume in the billions per second. All instruments continuously trade at one tick wide spreads. Retail investors are able to buy and sell with zero losses.

Options pricing is a solved problem; everyone uses machine learned models to predict up to 100 years in advance. Institutional investors have perfect knowledge of the market and the macro environment via continuous feeds from global surveillance networks. Human traders have long been retired from the trading floor.

Performance is now make-or-break for HFT. With such competitive pricing and high trade volume, all that matters is queue priority and autotrader fire speed. Every femtosecond in latency costs millions in missed edge.

The endgame has arrived: execution is everything.