> the English system encouraging divisibility by 2/3/4/6
I'm not sure that the Old English system used sixths much. Eighths for sure though.
Fun fact: The NYSE and NASDAQ switched from fractional dollar quoting to decimal dollar quoting in the 2002-2003 time frame. The reason was to narrow the bid/ask spread, as 1/64 of a dollar rounds to 2 cents.
The side effect was that prices could no longer be represented exactly as standard IEEE 754 floating point numbers and all calculations now have some small amount of error. Or you could do decimal math and be 50x slower. Take your pick!
They should have just reduced the minimum bid to 1/128th of a dollar!
I'm not sure that the Old English system used sixths much. Eighths for sure though.
Fun fact: The NYSE and NASDAQ switched from fractional dollar quoting to decimal dollar quoting in the 2002-2003 time frame. The reason was to narrow the bid/ask spread, as 1/64 of a dollar rounds to 2 cents.
The side effect was that prices could no longer be represented exactly as standard IEEE 754 floating point numbers and all calculations now have some small amount of error. Or you could do decimal math and be 50x slower. Take your pick!
They should have just reduced the minimum bid to 1/128th of a dollar!