I work mainly in energy market communications and systems that facilitate energy trading, balancing and such. Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering. Any good resources you can recommend?
Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
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Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#2I've heard from a friend in the energy trading space that they're a bit behind, but your question is still a bit too broad.
What in the financial space do you want to hear about? Networks, exchanges, settlement?
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#3Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages
I suspect that the energy market is a bit different from markets where being ruthlessly fast might be a good long term behavior. So there might be good reasons for that way of doing business due to the specific nature of the energy market.
For example a limited number of counter parties might make stable B2B relationships more valuable. Or regulatory compliance might require extra steps. Or the messaging system might be noisy.
Or not. I wonder how executives at the trading companies would describe the delay.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#4A lot of settlement in financial markets is still pretty slow. That’s a big reason why there was so much fintech interest in blockchain.
You may be thinking of high frequency trading. In that case, traders interact directly with an exchange - e.g. via direct market access[1] - so it’s a pre-established two-party interaction. There’s no particular technical difficulty with making that fast. Usually, slow transaction times are a consequence of the structure of the market, not a technical issue particularly.
[1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-map/s...
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#5Like someone else said your question is kind of broad. But I d recommend reading TigerBeetle's documentation to understand how financial transaction processing may differ from what they call general purpose databases like PostgreSQL.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#6I've heard from a friend in the energy trading space that they're a bit behind, but your question is still a bit too broad. What in the financial space do you want to hear about? Networks, exchanges, settlement?
I am mainly working on B2B message exchange, e.g. via AS4/EDIFACT/ebix/CIM files and most parties seem to still work with a lot of batch processing. With the ongoing digitization of e.g. metering hardware and faster settlement times in the energy markets (EU-centric) I think this might not cut it anymore in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#7I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types and tag values:
https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/
They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect during trading. I use it regularly.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#8Question is a bit broad, but out of all the concepts under the financial engineering umbrella you're bound to explore the concept of ledgering eventually.
I've written a bit about it on my own co's product blog in an attempt to demystify some core concepts [1], [2], [3].
Still on ledgering and expanding into less mathematical and more applied concepts, I can also recommend a book called "The Accounting Game: basic accounting fresh from the lemonade stand" [4].
[1]: https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/how-not-to-build-a... [2]: https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/debits-and-credits... [3]: https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/ledgering-all-the-... [4]: https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Accounting_Game.htm...
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#9There might be some gems for you in this old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573204
Book recommendations for learning financial systems.
Re: Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
#10There might be some gems for you in this old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573204 Book recommendations for learning financial systems.
I recently read Central Banking 101¹ and learned a lot!