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Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

scarcecapital.com

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Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#111
On a possibly related note, Josh Levine, creator of the Island trading engine, released the Foxpro source a few years ago.. Interesting stuff..

http://josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/default.htm

http://josh.com/notes/island-ecn-10th-birthday/ISLAND.PRG.TX...

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#112

This is a nice little research project, and I hope you learn a lot from it. Having written algorithmic trading systems I think you are missing on a couple of central points: 1. There is no such thing as the "best" algorithmic trading platform, because algorithmic trading is such a broad term. Architectures that make sense for one class of trades does not make sense for other class of trades. 2. Contrary to popular op…

> ...truly targeting low-latency and high frequency events concurrency is your enemy, not your friend.

This reminds me of the LMAX financial trading platform where they started with a concurrent model but ended up using a single-thread "...that will process 6 million orders per second..."

http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#113

This is a nice little research project, and I hope you learn a lot from it. Having written algorithmic trading systems I think you are missing on a couple of central points: 1. There is no such thing as the "best" algorithmic trading platform, because algorithmic trading is such a broad term. Architectures that make sense for one class of trades does not make sense for other class of trades. 2. Contrary to popular op…

> ...truly targeting low-latency and high frequency events concurrency is your enemy, not your friend. This reminds me of the LMAX financial trading platform where they started with a concurrent model but ended up using a single-thread "...that will process 6 million orders per second..." http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Yes, it is interesting, when you are becoming highly concurrent the penalty for context switching start taking its toll, but that's only when the rest of your trading system is already optimized.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#114
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't the infrastructure be open source while the specific trading algorithms kept closed source?

This could be a lot more fun than classic codewars. For 99% of the "system" there's no particular reason you'd have to connect to the NYSE and trade real stocks for real money. Looks like they're feeding from iqfeed, but I think it would be huge fun to create an imaginary competition exchange, convince about 100 algo writers to compete, and shove them up against each other purely for the fun of it, see who's a better…

We did this in collaboration with UofC, using our Algo trading platform (http://www.optionscity.com/event/uchicago-midwest-trading-co...) and it was really fun.

Hm, I wonder if there is an interest to make this a more open event :)

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trading (as in HFT) isn't the same as investing. While the mechanics can sometimes be similar, a trader is different from an investor. What HFT does is segment the market. It's probably best described as a form of arbitrage. Arbitrage is necessary, but in a good market hopefully it is pushed to some form of equilibrium. HFT has an impact on the trading market. However, that doesn't automatically extend to investment.

HFT is like a million tiny trolls underneath the bridge trying to extract their tax.

... replacing one big troll on the bridge that used to extract more than the million tiny ones' total...

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#116

This is a nice little research project, and I hope you learn a lot from it. Having written algorithmic trading systems I think you are missing on a couple of central points: 1. There is no such thing as the "best" algorithmic trading platform, because algorithmic trading is such a broad term. Architectures that make sense for one class of trades does not make sense for other class of trades. 2. Contrary to popular op…

Thanks Kasey,

I'm probably thinking of algos more generally and generically. For example, whatever the class of trades, I think that what you are doing is making a stochastic forecast of future price movements. So maybe there's a good separation possible between your algorithms that create a distribution and algos that determine how to trade once you have that distribution. But saying this probably reveals a bias I have to think statistically. And I totally agree the majority of the system build thats important is the boring stuff. An algorithm should be able to tell if the market feed has died or the market shuts down unexpectedly, right? And know what to do next. And good to hear that someone thinks the costs are much less than popular opinion suggests.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#117
The industry is doing the vast majority of its HFT development in C++ or Java. Data analysis is mostly done using Python although I still see a lot of R.

If you are doing this to break into the industry, I suspect the languages you used should have been the above. Also the above languages would probably have been better to attract open source developers who are also hoping to use their code and experience from this project to break into the industry.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#118

In another month or two the analytical tooling for doing stats and numerics in Haskell land are going to have a huge leap forward in capabilities. Might be worth considering going full Haskell then :-)

Whats happening then?

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#119

I have no experience in the financial industry, but HFT has always fascinated me as a potential source for very high rates of "events". Could you share your general insight about the sheer volume of data that commonly gets pushed through an HFT system? I'd also be terribly interested in a multi-megabyte/gigabyte "recording" of HFT trade data. http://www.nyxdata.com/capacity

This project is not HFT. It does not use a full book data feed. Really even the feeds that come from the exchanges are not precisely timestamped enough and HFT firms stamp their own . The data is not huge although trading system need to be able to deal with large spikes in the rate of events. Usually now people are using 10G/40G/Infinibad as a connect to the matching engine.

Re: Show HN: I'm building an open-source, high-frequency trading system

#120

This is a nice little research project, and I hope you learn a lot from it. Having written algorithmic trading systems I think you are missing on a couple of central points: 1. There is no such thing as the "best" algorithmic trading platform, because algorithmic trading is such a broad term. Architectures that make sense for one class of trades does not make sense for other class of trades. 2. Contrary to popular op…

> ...truly targeting low-latency and high frequency events concurrency is your enemy, not your friend. This reminds me of the LMAX financial trading platform where they started with a concurrent model but ended up using a single-thread "...that will process 6 million orders per second..." http://martinfowler.com/articles/lmax.html

Yes, but the concurrency has been shifted to the two disruptors at either end of the business process logic. And I suspect the business logic is fairly simple and lends itself to the straight through solution. If you want to react to a news event (say), you have to somehow send a signal to the feed requesting recent history (last 20 minutes say), have something waiting to look at it, crunch the numbers when they arrive to see if somethings up, then interupt the existing trade decision/risk management schedule with a potentially better trade. Complexity increases quickly and concurrency helps do all of that at high speed.
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