Viewing profile — Rimpinths

I work in the industry too and the things that people mislabel as "front running" is really aggravating. At worst, you could call it "order anticipating": using publicly available …

Great point, and you understand the American stock market better than most Americans. This article was true about 20 years ago, but the author is completely wrong when he says this…

Right. I love to listen to music while coding, but I couldn't listen to a podcast. I've tried, but I can't write words and listen to words at the same time. But music is no problem…

Some HFT strategies depend on fragmented exchanges. Look up "latency arbitrage" for examples.

I've seen this type of behavior described as "order anticipation", which I think is a much better term. "Front running" means that you are using confidential information that an or…

Does this remind anybody of the CueCat? Same story...subsidized hardware that hackers repurposed for other uses. I think the makers of CueCat tried to unsuccessfully sue the hacker…

But they are comparing sales per employee, not market cap per employee.

What you should really admire is Amazon's shareholders' tolerance for failure. A lot more companies would be more likely to take big risks like Amazon if their shareholders would t…

I'm reluctant to get involved in the politically incorrect side of this argument, but FWIW, that stat comes from "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", which was a paper published in…

They boasted that they signed up 1 million new Prime members in the 3rd week of December. I wonder how many of those people signed up for the free trial with the intention of cance…

Gold become desirable because it is an ideal metal to use for jewelry. That came first and its use as a currency came second. In that sense, it has been used in industry longer tha…

> And so on, and so forth. The author makes a big point of arguing that they aren't financial instruments so much as they are real assets. There's some truth to this; if I own a bi…

I was wondering the same thing. The number of employees is around 2300, according to Bloomberg. I think you could run Twitter with a development/engineering staff of 100. What are …

I think it's a bad sign when you see a company as dramatically overvalued as Twitter is. The primary function of stock markets is capital allocation, i.e. directing capital to comp…

Economist Joseph Lawrence of Princeton University in 1929: “The consensus judgment of the millions whose valuations function on that admirable market, the Stock Exchange, is that s…

There was an interesting article on Seeking Alpha a few months ago comparing Wal-Mart with Amazon at the same stage of growth (i.e. comparable level of overall revenue and revenue …

> They're thin in some places but huge in others. AWS, for example, has a 50% gross profit margin, and their gross margins on digital goods (mp3s, ebooks) are also high. How do you…

Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post set this up and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article about it. It's a great article, "Pearls Before Breakfast": http://www.washingtonpost.c…

It's an asset from the point of view of the bank or institution that made the loan. And they can transfer those assets from one investor to another. And the value of those assets c…

It was a pretty big deal. I ran some queries against some intraday data of a proprietary market index (kind of a cross between the S&P 500 and Russell 2000) and it was the biggest …

If you're really interested in this topic, Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" covers this in detail. Great book.

BATS Exchange in Kansas City is hiring C++ programmers. Needless to say, your background would be ideal. http://bats.com/about/careers/

Speaking as a software developer at one of the exchanges, I thought these comments were accurate and insightful. A lot of people think that colocation is inherently unfair, but the…

I thought what lrm242 said and what I said were pretty much the same thing. But there is no standard definition of 'latency', so it's hard to say what "they mean" unless they publi…

They are clustered together because it takes roughly the same amount of time to determine that an order can be matched (filled) or that it can't be matched (acknowledged, on the bo…