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I am an HFT Programmer

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Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#181

Post by Astrohacker »

burgerbrain wrote: post #156
Astrohacker wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but there are a number of reasons why you might not want to: 1) The US financial system is unsustainable. Specialize in it and you will find yourself out of a job eventually. 2) It's unethical. If you understand that your excess salary is coming from wealth that is stolen from people through the mechanism of inflation, then you may want to opt out of the corrupt system for peace of mind. 3) If the people actua…

Oh don't be melodramatic. If the US financial system fails you'll be screwed no matter your industry if you're being paid in US currency. And angry mobs coming to lynch you? Give me a break, such a thing is unprecedented and the shear number of people in the field will provide protection even if that does happen (as will the amount of money you'd be making). As for ethics: Perhaps the reason they are paid so much is…

> And angry mobs coming to lynch you? Give me a break, such a thing is unprecedented

Maybe you've never heard of the French revolution. Such a thing is definitely not unprecedented.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#182

Post by rgarcia »

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#…

Banking != HFT.

I've worked at both a bank and an HFT firm, so I think I have some perspective you might find interesting.

To make a broad generalization from my experience, "Traders" at a bank are mostly non-technical Excel junkies. It seems like in your experience they also went by the title "Programmer", which I agree is a gross misnomer. Besides that, I think the most important thing to realize is that at banks, non-technical people run the show. The technical people are at the disposal of their non-technical overlords, and thus they spend their every waking hour implementing terrible specs like "do {some incredibly specific task}, and make it fast." Even worse, they are far down on the ladder of responsibility; a "banking programmer" has no feel for the big picture. This all culminates in what you describe: highly specialized/one-off/non-generic piece-of-shit code. But whatever, their MBA overlords don't care about the means, just the ends.

To make another broad generalization, "Traders" at an HFT firm are predominantly go-getter CS majors from top schools. Thus, if they have an idea, they implement it themselves. Any delegation of duty is done with strict specs, and bugs or terrible design in the finished product will get noticed. Incentives abound for writing good code: scalability/genericness is rewarded (have something that averages $1k trading symbol XYZ every day? You're a millionaire if it generalizes to many symbols), speed is rewarded (just the nature of the game), and bugs should lose you money (otherwise they are just unknowingly optimized around).

tldr: banking is like you describe, but there is plenty of quality in the HFT world.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#183

Post by ad »

tmsh wrote: post #76

I used to work in HFT. From about 1999 (right out of high school) until 2008. In response to the OP, zedshaw and a couple of others (who make good points), I'd say: * obviously if you're good at your job in HFT after a while you don't have to work 100 hour weeks. People wait for you. There are levels of support. You still get woken up once in a while, but not if the firm is well structured and the support training /…

I'm sorry if you answered this elsewhere, but why did you stop working in HFT?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#184

Post by yummyfajitas »

iskander wrote: post #118
cletus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of the spread and the liquidity of the market are inversely proportional. The spread on US government bonds is zero or close enough to be zero. The spread on the Swiss bond market is considerably higher. Market makers can't artificially widen the spread without taking a position--sometimes a significant position--which carries a lot more risk. Spread trading in its purest form is about holding enough stock m…

What I'm saying is that high frequency market makers are only need in very small numbers (if even that). When 2/3 of a market's volume is HFT position shuffling, you're not "improving liquidity" in a way that's meaningful or useful to anyone.

When 2/3 of your packets are travelling from one server to another inside the data center, you're not "providing information to consumers" in a way that's meaningful or useful to anyone.

See the fallacy here?

Also, HFT's are present only in very small numbers (relative to the size of the financial industry in general).

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#185

Post by colanderman »

cletus wrote: post #39

I worked for a time in finance and investment banking. Problem-wise it can be pretty interesting but it's important to distinguish between two classes of developers. 1. Traders; and 2. Non-traders. Engineers who are traders are typically called "quants" (quantitative traders) as they write software that employs trading strategies to make money, as one or more of spread trading (trading between the bid-ask spread), pr…

> You want to buy a house? Well the only reason you can get a loan is that investor (and/or depositor) funds are matched to you.

Is there any reason why this should be enabled, and profited from, by a select few commercial IBs who are "in the know", as opposed to a government entity which reinvests the profits into, say, a low-income housing fund or social security?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#186

Post by burgerbrain »

Astrohacker wrote: post #181
burgerbrain wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh don't be melodramatic. If the US financial system fails you'll be screwed no matter your industry if you're being paid in US currency. And angry mobs coming to lynch you? Give me a break, such a thing is unprecedented and the shear number of people in the field will provide protection even if that does happen (as will the amount of money you'd be making). As for ethics: Perhaps the reason they are paid so much is…

> And angry mobs coming to lynch you? Give me a break, such a thing is unprecedented Maybe you've never heard of the French revolution. Such a thing is definitely not unprecedented.

So you won't take a job because you fear a french revolution scenario...

Like I said, melodramatic.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#187

Post by Jd »

Astrohacker wrote: post #109
Jd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currency is regulated into existence. Someone has to print it. Like it or not, there are all sorts of natural monopolies which exist in nature. The first and foremost is a monopoly on violence by the state. This is, in fact, demanded by the citizens who have a lot to lose if companies et al. were also allowed to pursue their interests by brandishing weapons. Thus, the first regulation is that companies cannot pursue…

> Currency is regulated into existence. Nope. Gold and bitcoins come from the market.

Gold is a commodity not a currency. Historically most currencies have been either minted in or based on valuable commodities. Virtually without exception they have been produced by governments.

Do you mean to argue that no currency ever has or should have been created by a government?

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#188

Post by william42 »

samlevine wrote: post #11
MarkPNeyer wrote: post #2

they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. i left trading because i wanted to do something that i knew would make a positive impact on the world.

>they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. Unless they're getting paid at a rate determined by regulations, by definition the value of their work is what their employer is willing to pay.

Externalities.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#189

Post by william42 »

damoncali wrote: post #87
sixtofour wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money can serve as a rough indicator of social value. For example, based on pay, society does not value teachers very much.

Teachers actually make decent money. We clearly don't value soldiers and McDonalds workers. Wait - then how come we're so violent and fat? Nevermind.

We're so violent that the rate of violent crimes has steadily decreased since 1994.

Re: I am an HFT Programmer

#190

Post by pak »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #184
iskander wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm saying is that high frequency market makers are only need in very small numbers (if even that). When 2/3 of a market's volume is HFT position shuffling, you're not "improving liquidity" in a way that's meaningful or useful to anyone.

When 2/3 of your packets are travelling from one server to another inside the data center, you're not "providing information to consumers" in a way that's meaningful or useful to anyone. See the fallacy here? Also, HFT's are present only in very small numbers (relative to the size of the financial industry in general).

If those extra packets could suddenly and uncontrollably leak out on the Internet and destroy everything, requiring a trillion dollar government bailout to fix it and ten years to restore confidence in the infrastructure, yes I would be pissed and doubly so that this inadequate analogy was used to defend it.
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