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Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

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Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#11

Post by lordnacho »

_1tan wrote: post #6
lordnacho wrote: post #2

I've heard from a friend in the energy trading space that they're a bit behind, but your question is still a bit too broad. What in the financial space do you want to hear about? Networks, exchanges, settlement?

I am mainly working on B2B message exchange, e.g. via AS4/EDIFACT/ebix/CIM files and most parties seem to still work with a lot of batch processing. With the ongoing digitization of e.g. metering hardware and faster settlement times in the energy markets (EU-centric) I think this might not cut it anymore in the future.

Find out if they are moving to FIX, FIXFAST, or some sort of ITCH (binary) type feed.

Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#16

Post by wavemode »

> Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering

Depends on what you mean by "financial systems". There are plenty of financial systems that takes days or weeks to fully process transactions.

You're probably referring to stock trading systems (which by their nature have to be extremely low latency). The term to search for is "HFT" (high-frequency trading).

Here is a recent paper on the topic (focused on C++, though most things you find will tend to be): https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04259

Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#17

Post by roughly »

brudgers wrote: post #3

Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages I suspect that the energy market is a bit different from markets where being ruthlessly fast might be a good long term behavior. So there might be good reasons for that way of doing business due to the specific nature of the energy market. For example a limited number of counter parties might make stable B2B relationships more valuable. Or regulatory compl…

One other thing that comes to mind - the players in the financial markets make so much money off that message-processing speed that it opens up a whole lot of options that may not be available to someone without those kinds of deep pockets. We're all still fighting Einstein, but the ability to just throw resources at the problem can surface some solutions that are out of reach when you manufacture something other than money.

Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#18

Post by dboreham »

I wouldn't look further than asking what happens currently in the processing of these messages. It might turn out for example that the minutes delay is deliberate: high frequency trading can become unstable more easily than low frequency trading. Perhaps there's a human in the loop?

Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#19

Post by asalahli »

Check out The Payments Engineer Playbook[0]. I don't work on financial systems but I'm subscribed and like the occasional distributed systems insights.

One of the posts turned up on HN front page a year ago[1]. Thats how I discovered it

0. https://news.alvaroduran.com/

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42269227

Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?

#20

Post by jbarrettcapone »

I would recommend the Jane Street youtube channel, the ocamal focused ones in my opinion you can skip. But otherwise their engineering videos will give you a good sense of it. When it comes to low latency systems this is a very private ecosystem. There are some open source projects for learning some of the mechanics of trading, market data and the order to settlement lifecycle. I am not aware of any being built for low latency.

Market data ingest, analysis and resulting order execution is chewing through way more data way faster than any banking transaction system. I have worked on both of them.

If you want more in the weeds but still high level I gave a talk on the main concepts and systems you need to know to code low latency for markets. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HIPJb0XX3JDHEYSrZC8v...

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