can someone tell me something i've been wondering for a couple days now (considering taking the plunge and toying around with bitcoin): how fast can you execute trades on coinbase/gdax? obviously i'm asking if i could experiment with hft-esque strategies. is that possible or the clearing time too long?
note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")
There are already open source implementation of arbitrage/hft style trading bots on GitHub. This a market with a large population of software engineers.
Exchanges have open APIs that you can use for trading. They execute pretty much instantly.
But GDAX is a vertically integrated exchange and retail trading platform, so the 0.1% taker fee is all you pay. A stock exchange won't talk to you directly so you must pay additional broker/clearing/bank fees.
Real all-in fees for stock can be 2 USD to trade 2k USD, so 0.1%, same as GDAX. But you can also find fees of 10 USD to trade 100k USD and many other rate examples which are either higher or lower.
I think a lot of people don't notice the huge difference between a traditional exchange (which does not handle money, only agreements about money) and GDAX (vertically integrated exchange + clearing house + trading application).
note: on a very small scale (like ~100$ total "aum")