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I've never seen a "personal guarantee" requirement as such. Can you provide an example of the language used for this? It would seem to completely negate the primary purpose of an LLC.

I don't think these two are as linked to Vegas-style gambling, but they are stories that cover some major changes in trading over the years: Thomas Peterrfy has been active for the entire period you mention, and had a lot of ties to the technology aspect and the changes that took place...

You're probably familiar with the book Fortune's Formula by Poundstone -- I thought it was great. Ed Thorp is one of the most significant characters in that book and has quite an interesting story incorporating both casino games and trading. The Renaissance Technology founders also had...

Good point -- techonology gives us a lot of benefits, but also a lot of new ways to waste time. I guess we would have fewer regrets in this area if we had greater discipline -- cutting out time spent on electronics that's neither highly productive nor deeply satisfying.

You're joking, I hope? On the ECN's that constitute the lion's share of volume, these rebates are given only for adding liquidity, and there's adverse selection cost to this ("picking up pennies in front of a steam roller"). So it's hardly "without risk". For ECN's which rebate fractions of a...

Ask the broker -- Sterling's routes are highly broker dependent; even the obvious ones may only be partially implemented. As I understood it, some Sterling "routes" are even one-offs for a single client. Caveat emptor.

Excellent point! Just as floor traders were dragged into early retirement (or other jobs) a few years ago, so it goes for many point-and-click traders, and even some HFT's. Although there are no doubt HFT "abuses" in various parts of the market, the effect of such "abuses" is far less...

You might get more relevant replies in the "careers" section of nuclearphynace.com or wilmott.com, which seem focused on institution-ish quants and their issues.

Sad situation. In many "developing" countries, families loyally take care of their members to a far greater degree than in the US, and maybe this is in part due to a LACK of a government safety net. This seems to have the unexpected benefit of people being less apt to treat their family like...

My first guess is that the algo just isn't very good and is simply doing what it's programmed to do, which doesn't make sense in this case. But are you sure they're all different people hitting your bid or ask?

I diagree, if your objective is to outperform the market. If you're just churning your account for entertainment purposes or are diversifying as part of a retirement strategy, then maybe it makes sense, but this is a trading forum, so I'm going to assume otherwise. “What’s nice about...

You seem to be pretty confident you've got it figured out -- why waste your time posting/responding here? Why not just trade your strategy? If it's really as good as you seem to think it is, you can build a hedge fund around it, and you can spend your free time talking to your clients about...

FIX really isn't that difficult -- I ported all my connectivity to FIX in a couple of afternoons, and I'd never used FIX before, although I did have some background in sockets/distributed systems. In any event, I've found FIX far better designed, more stable, and more versatile than platform...

Large banks invested a lot in this space over 2009-2010, as I read tens or even hundreds of millions just to get in the door in some cases, but this looks like overinvestment now. By most indications, the space looks more crowded and competitive than ever. Just look at spreads, and consider...

FIX is just a connection protocol, and it is implemented somewhat differently at every place it exists, although the differences can be small. FIX can be used to talk directly with exchange servers (so no broker between you and the exchange at all), although this type of arrangement, known as...

Supposedly Penson got supplemental insurance at LLoyd's: https://www.zecco.com/explore/security.aspx But how much in total client assets does Penson have? Will only $600 million cover it?

My discussion of "hard work" is not meant to imply that working hard necessarily leads to trading success -- in fact, I've shared my opinion on this forum that the following ideas, frequently put forward on ET, are fallacies: Bogus idea 1: By spending 10000's of hours watching a computer...

I think I see your point and you're right, as long as a 50/50 is what you really want -- in the long run, you'll get it. I also think that the OP wanted something better than 50/50, so it's up to him/her to figure out whether he/she made some mistake in backtesting, slippage, etc., in...

That sounds a lot like the Monte Carlo fallacy, held at one time even by significant mathematicians of an earlier period: a fair coin that has flipped to heads 10 times in a row is now more likely to hit tails on the next flip. (It turns out, it's a fallacy.) If I were in the OP's position...

Although I agree that bad leadership could destroy a firm under any set of regulations, I think that using customer funds to generate brokerage firm revenue in any way is courting disaster. If dismantling this model means that [b]stated[b/] commissions/fees go up by 50% or even 100%, I'd say so...