High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident • Hacker News Board

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#11

Post by smoothgrammer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:18 AM UTC

In finance you'll find low accountability for developers. Basically finance is where great developers go to get paid a lot to become horrible developers. Very few companies in finance are pushing the bar on quality code since they culturally cannot accept the cost of that. It doesn't make sense until it is too late and by then their code base is too entrenched.

I've seen this at countless finance companies, and from interviewing people across the entire spectrum of finance. It is a rare corner of the industry where you'll find quality engineering. Usually everyone in a finance company thinks they are amazing engineers, and are just plain wrong.

My advice: work smarter, not harder.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#12

Post by smoothgrammer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:19 AM UTC

jwatte wrote: post #4

Acceptance testing fail! When changing code, and especially code that has consequences, doing so without tests is a bad idea. Doing so to protocol code without conformance tests is doubly bad.

Sadly, this is the norm in finance. You would be shocked at the shittastic state of the companies that dominate in this industry. They are literally a house of cards waiting for a strong gust of wind.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#13

Post by smoothgrammer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:22 AM UTC

Tinyyy wrote: post #10

I don't know much about stocks trading, can someone ELI5? Thanks.

Basically imagine you want to buy apples from 3 different fruit stands in different parts of a city.

Fruit stand 1 is the cheapest, fruit stand 2 is the 2nd cheapest, and fruit stand 3 is the third cheapest.

You want to buy all the apples out there.

The rule is that you have to go to the cheapest fruit stand first, and exhaust their supply before moving onto the next cheapest fruit stand. If you want to go to ALL the fruit stands at the same time you need to tell them you are an 'OK' guy and are really buying fruit everywhere.

Well, someone deleted code and ignored one of the fruit stands. This violated a rule and cost the fruit buyer a lot of money in penalties.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#14

Post by smoothgrammer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:23 AM UTC

mathgenius wrote: post #9

azinman2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably exists now, and not before. Writing this software would be very scary for me -- I'm confident in my work for the most part but I'm only human. To then let a "for-loop" go wild making thousands of trades per second on the entire market with real money against other high frequency traders no less.. man... you gotta be really really really really sure of your code!

Yeah, well, f kups happen, you just gotta make sure you are making more money than you lose in those incidents.

Or you just write a test that checks to make sure you don't screw up.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#15

Post by smoothgrammer » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:27 AM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #5

deckar01 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some unit tests would be nice. Maybe even a special folder full of tests that know when laws have been broken.

Probably exists now, and not before. Writing this software would be very scary for me -- I'm confident in my work for the most part but I'm only human. To then let a "for-loop" go wild making thousands of trades per second on the entire market with real money against other high frequency traders no less.. man... you gotta be really really really really sure of your code!

It is not about confidence. It is about ownership and being a good engineer. A good engineer would have cared about the code base and ensured that a test would fail, a use case would be linked to that failure, and someone would see that they have now violated a regulation.

Then if the regulation changed, someone would grep through the use cases, and see what behavior is occuring/ how to modify the code base to cope with the change in regulations (this occurs a lot). Of course most finance firms don't do this and actually violate regulations all the time. There is literally a gold mine for the SEC/FINRA to go after, but the government is fairly incompetent at mining through the data and holding companies accountable. The reason being that they don't pay enough to hire the talent that would uncover the violations.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#16

Post by x0054 » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

deckar01 wrote: post #3

keyle wrote: post #2

Doesn't matter how much money is involved or the quality of a team, someone somewhere will always do an oopsie. Maybe that particular 'code' should have had a little comment such as // used by ISO stuff do not delete Commenting tricky / non-obvious code is well recommended.

Some unit tests would be nice. Maybe even a special folder full of tests that know when laws have been broken.

Or how about at least some code documentation. In this case the programer deleted the code because he didn't understand why it was there. Well a simple "# Needed to Comply with regulation X" would probably have prevented this problem.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#17

Post by x0054 » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 5:39 AM UTC

Every time I read stories about high speed trading, I have to wonder what is actually the point of high speed trading to the society. The point of a free and fast stock market is to provide monetary liquidity and stabilize the economy by shortening the feedback loop. But something tells me that our society and economy derives zero benefit from nanosecond resolution trading vs. trading with say 1 minute resolution. Meanwhile, the market is exposed to wild swings which might be smoothed over or even prevented if markets worked a little slower.

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#18

Post by herbig » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:02 AM UTC

The best part of this article is the feature graphic, that of a castle with the caption:

THIS IS A TOWER. PHOTOGRAPHER: DAMIEN MEYER/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The article mentions "Tower Research".

Is the image/caption a joke, auto-generated by content, or just plain laziness?

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#19

Post by bdonlan » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:05 AM UTC

smoothgrammer wrote: post #13

Tinyyy wrote: post #10

I don't know much about stocks trading, can someone ELI5? Thanks.

Basically imagine you want to buy apples from 3 different fruit stands in different parts of a city. Fruit stand 1 is the cheapest, fruit stand 2 is the 2nd cheapest, and fruit stand 3 is the third cheapest. You want to buy all the apples out there. The rule is that you have to go to the cheapest fruit stand first, and exhaust their supply before moving onto the next cheapest fruit stand. If you want to go to ALL the…

Why does the SEC care that you bought shares at a price higher than the cheapest? How does that hurt anyone other than yourself?

Re: High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

#20

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 02, 2015, 6:19 AM UTC

bdonlan wrote: post #19

smoothgrammer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically imagine you want to buy apples from 3 different fruit stands in different parts of a city. Fruit stand 1 is the cheapest, fruit stand 2 is the 2nd cheapest, and fruit stand 3 is the third cheapest. You want to buy all the apples out there. The rule is that you have to go to the cheapest fruit stand first, and exhaust their supply before moving onto the next cheapest fruit stand. If you want to go to ALL the…

Why does the SEC care that you bought shares at a price higher than the cheapest? How does that hurt anyone other than yourself?

[deleted]