We chose Java for our high-frequency trading application

We chose Java for our high-frequency trading application
medium.com

I worked in the industry and it's always a little funny to see who calls themselves HFTs vs quants.

Basically, there's a bit of a spectrum of fast vs smart. In general it's hard to do incredibly smart stuff fast enough to compete in the "speed-critical" bucket of trades and vice-versa there's barely any point in being ultra-fast in the "non-speed-critical" bucket because your alphas last for minutes to hours.

Just from this read, I feel like these folks are just a hair to the right of "fast" in the [fast]---------[smart] continuum. I mostly make this appraisal based on these paragraphs:

>To gain those few crucial microseconds, most players invest in expensive hardware: pools of servers with overclocked liquid-cooled CPUs (in 2020 you can buy a server with 56 cores at 5.6 GHz and 1 TB RAM), collocation in major exchange datacentres, high-end nanosecond network switches, dedicated sub-oceanic lines (Hibernian Express is a major provider), even microwave networks. >It’s common to see highly customised Linux kernels with OS bypass so that the data “jumps” directly from the network card to the application, IPC (Interprocess communication) and even FPGAs (programmable single-purpose chips).

That's nice but that's where the cutting edge of the speed game was in 2007ish. Everything mentioned here is table stakes at this point (colocation, dedicated fiber, expensive switches, bypassing the kernel in network code, etc). The fact that "even FPGAs" is listed as "even" is the biggest thing I focus on. FPGA's and/or custom silicon is where the speed game is right now. Similarly, "even microwave networks" is also table stakes at this point (you can get on nasdaq's wireless[0] just by paying).

This is the kind of game where capex for technology is dwarfed by the margin you're slinging around every day in trading, so you see some pretty absurd hardware justified.

[0] http://n.nasdaq.com/WirelessConnectivitySuite

Edit: Also shout-out to a different comment in this thread mentioning ISLD, a story I considered telling as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24896603

This was a pretty reasonable choice at the time, as this was long before C++11 was around, and Java just offered a lot of advantages for developer ergonomics.

A natural consequence of this is that a number of HFT shops that were seeded by ex-ISLD devs just fell into using something like the ISLD tech stack, which at least at first involved a lot of GC-free Java.

Specifically, the C4 looks very interesting, although I'm a bit perplexed because, if it was universally good as it's written, they would have essentially solved one of the major problems not just for Java, but for a large amount of languages.