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LSE Halts

londonstockexchange.com

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Re: LSE Halts

#61

Post by ig1 »

chollida1 wrote: post #56
ig1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the exchanges have the required talent. Being the best exchange technology company is like being the best team in a minor league. If you're good at extreme low latency stuff you're going to be working for a bank. At a bank being great at low-latency can mean tens of millions of dollars of profit for your trading desk and a huge bonus for your personally. At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well…

> At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well not much, your exchange gets a bit more flow and you get a pat on the back. Exchanges pay out bigger bonus' than you'd imagine. 7 figures for a programmer is high but no where out of the ordinary. Says a guy who has worked for an exchange.

I seriously doubt any exchange is regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses.

Which exchange did you work for, I don't see one on your linkedin profile?

Re: LSE Halts

#62

Post by wingo »

CountHackulus wrote: post #60
axod wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GC isn't a problem for realtime systems, if configured correctly. For example, have the GC running incrementally in a separate thread.

Close, you do need to stop the world every once in a while to GC some of the harder stuff. But it's true, there's flavors of Java that are certified for hard realtime. If you stop the GC for 100ms every 2s regardless if you need it or not, that's pretty nice and predictable behavior for a realtime system.

100ms is an eternity. You can do GC with 1ms pauses.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/azul_gc_in_detail, for one example.

Re: LSE Halts

#63

Post by scott_s »

alecco wrote: post #30
mtkd wrote: post #12

"And as a final note, solely for the seriously nerdy techies, there's been some talk about the failure being due to F# error." http://ftalphaville.ft.com/marketslive/

I still don't understand how they choose languages with garbage collection for systems that should be real time or similar.

You may be interested in the Metronome project, which aims to provide a GC suitable for realtime use: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pa...

An academic paper about the project, Design and Implemention of a Comprehensive Real-Time Java Virtual Machine: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_people.nsf/page...

Re: LSE Halts

#64

Post by _debug_ »

ig1 wrote: post #61
chollida1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well not much, your exchange gets a bit more flow and you get a pat on the back. Exchanges pay out bigger bonus' than you'd imagine. 7 figures for a programmer is high but no where out of the ordinary. Says a guy who has worked for an exchange.

I seriously doubt any exchange is regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses. Which exchange did you work for, I don't see one on your linkedin profile?

Exchanges often use (relatively) esoteric hardware + real-time OSes, such as the Tandem NonStop series. Experience with such a platform + domain knowledge about the finance industry is a rare combination, so I find it plausible that a couple of core expert programmers on the stock exchange's system get compensated quite well. High six figures + 80% bonus == seven figure, I guess?

Re: LSE Halts

#65

Post by rs »

ig1 wrote: post #35
laktek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's about talent, but more of a problem of proper planning and execution. It seems things had been rushed to meet the tight demands, causing the chaos. When LSE acquired MilleniumIT, to redo the platform, they claimed to have developed world fastest trading platform[1] and had enough talent under their belt developing trading systems around the globe for last decade. [1] http://www.wallstreetandtech.co…

None of the exchanges have the required talent. Being the best exchange technology company is like being the best team in a minor league. If you're good at extreme low latency stuff you're going to be working for a bank. At a bank being great at low-latency can mean tens of millions of dollars of profit for your trading desk and a huge bonus for your personally. At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well…

None of the exchanges have the required talent.

Ahem, based on what evidence exactly did you reach that conclusion ?

TBH, from all the exchanges/brokers I've seen and dealt with in the past, there are a few that are pretty solid - Deutsche Borse is one of them. There's EuroMTS as well.

Essentially, most exchanges that deal with many market makers have got an extremely challenging technical problem to solve - scaling and latency. One that most investment banks can't even begin to solve.

I'm not saying there aren't any good talent in banks - there are plenty. I'm just saying that there's some really smart, talented people in exchanges.

Re: LSE Halts

#66

Post by tzs »

alecco wrote: post #36
timrobinson wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not F# or Java, it's C++. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2261896

It could be some left over system from the previous .Net platform causing a knock-on effect.

That seems unlikely. F# only recently moved from being an experimental language from Microsoft Research to a supported .NET language. The previous system is old enough to predate that.

Re: LSE Halts

#68

Post by alecco »

chollida1 wrote: post #57
alecco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't believe 100% in those statements.

> I wouldn't believe 100% in those statements. Why not? What makes you think this is a lie?

They systematically cover the problems and have zero transparency. Never a post-mortem. Like back in January.

Re: LSE Halts

#69

Post by chollida1 »

ig1 wrote: post #61
chollida1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At an exchange being great a low-latency means ... well not much, your exchange gets a bit more flow and you get a pat on the back. Exchanges pay out bigger bonus' than you'd imagine. 7 figures for a programmer is high but no where out of the ordinary. Says a guy who has worked for an exchange.

I seriously doubt any exchange is regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses. Which exchange did you work for, I don't see one on your linkedin profile?

> I seriously doubt any exchange is regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses.

I'd agree with that. Having said that, I doubt many investment banks are regularly paying developers multi-million dollar bonuses.

The people who get those are called quants or traders, even if they have programming skills, just my experience.

> Which exchange did you work for? I'd rather not say, if you want to know, contact me via email. Not sure how you got my linked in info as it's not attached to my profile.

Re: LSE Halts

#70

Post by StrawberryFrog »

tzs wrote: post #66
alecco wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be some left over system from the previous .Net platform causing a knock-on effect.

That seems unlikely. F# only recently moved from being an experimental language from Microsoft Research to a supported .NET language. The previous system is old enough to predate that.

Agreed. and Anderson consulting using an experimental, non-obvious language? I don't see it.
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