Engineered Simultaneity: The Physical Impossibility of Consolidated Price Discovery Across Spacelike-Separated Exchanges

arXiv:2602.22350v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce the concept of engineered simultaneity: a system design that (1) requires comparing events at spacelike-separated locations, (2) implements this comparison via an implicit simultaneity convention, and (3) represents the result as objective rather than conventional. The United States National Best Bid and Offer (NBBO), mandated by SEC Regulation NMS Rule 611, is shown to be an instance of engineered simultaneity. We prove that the NBBO is frame-dependent: its value depends on the reference frame in which “current” prices are defined. Since the exchanges that generate quote data are separated by distances of 43-1,180 km, light-travel times of 143-3,940 microseconds create unavoidable windows during which no frame-independent price ordering exists. High-frequency trading firms exploit this window by accessing exchange data via direct feeds (latency ~tens of microseconds) while the consolidated Securities Information Processor operates at ~1,128 microseconds — a ratio exceeding 50:1. We demonstrate that this constitutes a category mistake in the sense of Ryle: the NBBO applies the concept of “simultaneity” in a domain where it has no frame-independent meaning. The resulting information asymmetry extracts approximately $5 billion annually from other market participants.