Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I am an HFT Programmer

developers.slashdot.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 246 posts

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#41

Post by veyron »

danso wrote: post #15
veyron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why profits don't flow down is because the buck doesn't stop with them. There are plenty of developers making much more, but in those cases they take the fall if a trading strategy loses money. Those developers that do take the risks make more if the firm makes more money, but also lose their jobs if they make a really bad trade. Same is true in other software development outfits as well. Lower-level progr…

Why would developers be making trading strategy?

Most ultra low latency trading strategies are intimately related to the technology platform. Here's an example strategy:

Most platforms slow down when there is an influx of orders into the market. Some are designed to force events during the process (which allows for action while prices move, but the prices may be stale) and others are designed to process all feed messages before forcing an event (which ensure prices are more up-to-date but doesnt allow you to make a trade earlier)

Suppose you are betting that this represents a market rally or collapse (directional). Then, you can make money by figuring out the direction of the move (aggressive processing of the first few messages in a burst) and get involved before every other system catches up in the feed.

Now, it would be very hard to imagine a non-developer having enough of an understanding of the technology to devise this strategy. Not all examples are so obvious, but many microstructure strategies depend on some understanding of the technologies involved

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#42

Post by DasIch »

jasonkester wrote: post #37

Quick quiz: Given the ability to charge $100/hr for your time (which is what this guy's rate works out to), would you prefer to make: a.) $500,000 by working 100hr weeks b.) $250k by working 50hr weeks Me? I tend to lean toward secret option c: make $100k by working 25 40hr weeks, then spend the rest of the year squandering it on a beach with tall cold beers, good surfing/climbing and good wifi. Gotta keep them prior…

Indeed. What is the point of making so much money if you don't have time to spend it or have anything that resembles a life for that matter.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#43

Post by jamesteow »

orijing wrote: post #35

It's true, and it's somewhat discouraging. When I was in my last year in college, I applied to various types of companies, in different stages of life, plus a quant fund. In the end, while the salary/potential bonus for the fund was very enticing (despite not having graduated yet), I stuck with the middle-of-the-road tech company. (I also looked at Google and Dropbox but decided to go to FB). Google was desperate for…

"What the hell are you gonna do with 500k a year, anyway?"

Buy a house? A car? Invest in your own future business?

I agree with the sentiment of your post. I prefer earning less but working with intelligent, sensible people while also believing in my work because my mental health supersedes material needs.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#44

Post by uptown »

danso wrote: post #15
veyron wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why profits don't flow down is because the buck doesn't stop with them. There are plenty of developers making much more, but in those cases they take the fall if a trading strategy loses money. Those developers that do take the risks make more if the firm makes more money, but also lose their jobs if they make a really bad trade. Same is true in other software development outfits as well. Lower-level progr…

Why would developers be making trading strategy?

Quants

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#45

Post by TheEzEzz »

orijing wrote: post #35

It's true, and it's somewhat discouraging. When I was in my last year in college, I applied to various types of companies, in different stages of life, plus a quant fund. In the end, while the salary/potential bonus for the fund was very enticing (despite not having graduated yet), I stuck with the middle-of-the-road tech company. (I also looked at Google and Dropbox but decided to go to FB). Google was desperate for…

Squirrel it away for 5 years then retire on 5% returns on a million bucks ($50,000) a year?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#46

Post by Jd »

Astrohacker wrote: post #31
hugh3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the people on the internet who talk about economics the most appear to be the people who understand it the least. This is unusual. I mean, the people on the internet who talk about Batman the most generally turn out to know a lot more about Batman than I do. And the people on the internet who talk about tae kwan do the most turn out to know more about tae kwan do than I do. But for economics it is, for some…

Fun fact: Everyone knows the finance industry is highly corrupt, but point out the mechanism of the corruption and you will be downvoted.

Your analysis is a bit superficial. The government connections keep them from being regulated but don't adequately explain how they can skim so much off the top. For instance, how do the big firms (e.g. Goldman) manage to get into oil futures, create new fangled products that others will buy, get everyone to follow them into the same market sector, raise the price of oil, pocket billions of dollars, and leave the market before it goes south. It's actually hundreds of years of accumulated know-how in a somewhat needed but mostly bogus market sector -- of which the first priority is how to convince very intelligent and hard working people that they are doing some admirable or at least neutral when they are in fact destroying the economic base of the country they are in, siphoning all of the talent into meaningless and counterproductive tasks, and pouring their money into the political machine in order to increase corruption so they will never be held accountable for their actions.

The short answer is an excellent understanding of human psychology leading to good marketing. Most criminals think they aren't doing something wrong. Most people can be trained to do very damaging (even evil) actions by acculturation and habituation. Americans have been re-educated in the past fifty years to think that all sorts of things are okay that they never would have thought when we were the industrial superpower that invented and produced everything imaginable (e.g. car, plane, tv, space shuttles, etc.). Of course, most of these changes in American thinking aren't politically correct to mention.

Nowadays people either go into finance or work on some little web startup in the hopes they will make a billion dollars -- but at least that is better than being a patent troll. The AirBnB scandal is in fact a great example of the present dynamic. It is a great service on top of existing infrastructure. That's basically all Americans do these days -- a service economy on top of actual products that are increasingly being produced elsewhere. Sometimes those services are good, sometimes not so good, but barely anyone actually builds anything that is made to last -- nor do they seem to care.

Wake up America!

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#47

Post by apaprocki »

zedshaw wrote: post #34

This is a huge load of bullshit. 99% of the "banking programmers" are some of the worst coders in the world. A vast majority of them just babysit a Bloomberg terminal, barely understanding the supposed math they use all day. Others just babysit an Excel spreadsheet, or worse, develop whole applications in Excel then try to get a real programmer to "build it". The lower echelons are even worse and just make shitty C#…

So one takeaway from this gem of a post is that if you don't write open-source code you're a shitty programmer?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#48

Post by orijing »

TheEzEzz wrote: post #45
orijing wrote: post #35

It's true, and it's somewhat discouraging. When I was in my last year in college, I applied to various types of companies, in different stages of life, plus a quant fund. In the end, while the salary/potential bonus for the fund was very enticing (despite not having graduated yet), I stuck with the middle-of-the-road tech company. (I also looked at Google and Dropbox but decided to go to FB). Google was desperate for…

Squirrel it away for 5 years then retire on 5% returns on a million bucks ($50,000) a year?

But I don't want to retire! I know that by doing what I love for the rest of my life, I'll have enough to sustain my basic needs. 500k seems excessive. It's simultaneously too much for me to spend efficiently for myself, yet too small for me to do bigger things like fight cancer, invest in education, etc (like Bill Gates).

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#49

Post by veyron »

zedshaw wrote: post #34

This is a huge load of bullshit. 99% of the "banking programmers" are some of the worst coders in the world. A vast majority of them just babysit a Bloomberg terminal, barely understanding the supposed math they use all day. Others just babysit an Excel spreadsheet, or worse, develop whole applications in Excel then try to get a real programmer to "build it". The lower echelons are even worse and just make shitty C#…

Fast C++ is an oxymoron. Real men use C and assembly. And yes, I bootstrapped my own HFT

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#50

Post by sixtofour »

hugh3 wrote: post #14

How to get a really good salary: 1. Be really smart 2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people Me? I'm a scientist. I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm or remove your varicose veins or argue about some dull point of legal text in court. But I'm sure I'd be a lot richer if I did. (In other news, man, those grapes sure look sour, I'm glad I can't reach 'em.)

"2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people", ...

... and super lucrative to their employers.

Otherwise shelf stocking might be a good route to riches.

Post reply on HN