There a free online accredited master's degree in Financial Engineering (https://www.wqu.edu/mscfe), probably not for OP but maybe some find it useful for them
Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
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Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#22# Books
## *Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris*
- comprehensive overview written in an accessible way
## *The Microstructure of Financial Markets by Frank de Jong and Barbara Rindi*
- 1st 1/4 of the book is generally useful. Then the math starts. This math is not needed to get a basic overview.
These are two books I wish someone gave to me when I started my first capital markets software engineering job. I recommend them to all the people I place in financial system engineering roles.
This is my passion. Message me if you want to talk more about this — see HN profile for contact info.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#23A lot of settlement in financial markets is still pretty slow. That’s a big reason why there was so much fintech interest in blockchain. You may be thinking of high frequency trading. In that case, traders interact directly with an exchange - e.g. via direct market access[1] - so it’s a pre-established two-party interaction. There’s no particular technical difficulty with making that fast. Usually, slow transaction t…
In the broad picture of engineering, I would consider this to be technically difficult. Many pieces of the puzzle need to interact correctly to remove latency, from physical location, network gear, decision about where software runs, removing unnecessary layers of everything, to algos and data structures, and doing razor-tight tradeoff analysis favoring low-latency at every step along the way. It’s also expensive. So it’s hard to agree that this is not hard. On the flip side, if you find this easy and want a job, msg me.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#24I recently learned of Kdb+ and the associated ecosystem of financial tools.
May be worth getting a head start on these, I understand these are the tools that the HFTs and the quants use.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#25Currently 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 tha…
I agree and scale is one of the reasons there's so much money to be made. The NYSE trades over $18 billion a day. A small edge can be exercised many many times.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#26"The Disruptor is the result of our efforts to build the world’s highest performance financial exchange at LMAX."
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#27I enjoy Patio11’s Bits About Money Essays. You’ll frequently see his posts make the front page of HN.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#28You might want to checkout the books by Timothy Masters - http://www.timothymasters.info/
I had come across his books when searching for ML books in C++. He has applied ML/Statistical/Deep Learning/etc. techniques to Market Trading Systems and other domains. Generally all his books contain implementations in C/C++.
The reviews of his books on Amazon gives you confidence that he really knows his stuff from a practical/industry pov.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#29I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types and tag values: https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/ They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect during trading. I use it regularly.
Also work in the FX space and could never find a good FIX specification resource. Always had to rely on whatever the broker shared with us, but it always felt incomplete. This is a super useful resource. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#30_1tan I have emailed your posted contact data should you see value.
I have personally founded, architected, and coded in entirety several acquired payment processing companies in the last 30 years of which were near 100% uptime as well as PCI Level 1 compliant among several other audit stipulations. Your mention of energy trading *immediately* caught my eye as I am now building an energy storage company that is founded in design on top of my decades evolved secure highly available API transaction engine that I am refactoring to support VPP to manage the energy storage array I am patenting.
My ying appears to align with your yang from my understanding of your words so if this is something of interest please feel free to engage from my outreach.
Stay Healthy!