Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering? • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by Copenjin » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 7:57 AM UTC

tubignaaso wrote: post #29

ekkeke wrote: post #7

I 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!

Do you really need anything more than the dictionary? https://www.onixs.biz/fix-dictionary.html

Implementations varies, no one forces the third party to use message types 100% as intended.

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

#32

Post by antonvs » Tue, Nov 25, 2025, 5:58 PM UTC

koliber wrote: post #23

antonvs wrote: post #4

A 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. S…

The OP mentioned that "most parties there take minutes to process messages". My point is really that if transactions are taking minutes to complete, that's likely to be a social/structural problem, not a technical one.

With today's technology and all the work in this space, it's not particularly technically difficult to get such times down into the seconds or milliseconds, depending on the constraints.

Yes, HFT has gone to extremes to get trade execution times down as low as microseconds. And sure, that involves technical challenges. But they're mostly sort of obvious ones - you mentioned some of the major categories - that yield to throwing engineering talent at. But I was referring to the Pareto 80% of gains here.

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

#33

Post by gethly » Thu, Nov 27, 2025, 7:55 AM UTC

I am not sure what you are asking for here. You work in communications and the involved parties are slow to process messages. OK, so how would YOU be able to influence those parties to be faster? Do you make the software they use? Are you their service provider that owns the network or hardware? Are you trying to disrupt the whole industry with some new protocol? ... or what?