A Tale Of Two Towers

In a weedy field 35 miles west of Chicago squats a tidy red-brick building with a peaked roof, about the size of a one-car garage.

- Nick Baker and Bryan Gruley

Against the eastern wall, reaching just above the roofline, are poles equipped with small dish antennas that send microwave signals to and gather them from financial markets on the East Coast. At the same time, the site communicates via subterranean cable with an enormous steel-and-glass building across the street. That fortress is home to CME Group Inc., a $63 billion exchange where some of the world’s most vital financial products trade, including derivatives on oil, gold, U.S. Treasuries, and the S&P 500. If you want to be a serious player in global markets, you have little choice but to stash your trading machines here.

The little brick hut in Aurora, Ill., is part of New Line Networks LLC, a joint venture of Chicago’s Jump Trading LLC and Virtu Financial Inc. of New York City, two of the nation’s most successful high- frequency trading firms. In 2016, Jump Trading paid $14 million for the 31-acre plot where the building sits to be close to the CME center.

Not far away, high-frequency trading company DRW Holdings LLC of Chicago, angling to be even a few yards nearer, slapped an antenna on a light pole. Next to that stands yet another pole rigged with antennas, this one owned by McKay Brothers, an Oakland-based company that builds telecommunications networks and leases access to traders.

Up and down adjacent roads, trading companies have erected or rented space on more towers and poles, all of them arrayed with white circular dishes. These companies, too, are seeking to cozy up to the CME data center, trying to shave millionths of a second off trades. They save that time by keeping their data in the air, where it travels at maximum speed, for as long as possible. The closer their dishes to the data center, the shorter their underground connections, the speedier their transmissions.