Quote from amazingIndustry:
you PM me to suck information regarding backtesting strategies and now you disparage me when I simply state the truth? At least do not kiss up to the ones you later trample on.
Yeah, that was a while ago. No kiss up there mate, and I didn't get anything useful from it. I gave and did not receive, but no hard feelings.
...
I realize that you are completely un-knowledgeable about this niche. I recommend you stick to discretionary day trading and keep on joking about the programmers who work on the high frequency side of things, it does not look this business will ever become your bread and butter.
Well it was my bread and butter for a while, professionally. Tougher game now, especially for an individual. Everyone's pretty fast. Most of the traditional arbs are gone, but still something there for a virtual market maker, if you're in the right place, with the right costs. I wouldn't call that discretionary.
I admit I am not your typical big-mouth traditional Salomon Bros. type trader, I came to my first trading desk with a highly quantitative Master's degree and need to know quite a bit about programming in order to understand what can be done and what not as soon as I got fully into the systematic trading space.
Different attitude to tech & quants on the desks I was on. Mostly ex-Salomon guys actually now I think about it. Floor boss too. Perhaps it's a firm culture thing. Unlikely but possible.
By the way, most top programmers currently earn a higher base salary AND cash bonus than top traders within investment banks, well, this past year at least since bonuses have been capped. In that sense I do not understand your apparent aversion to programmers. I consider programmers my most important counter parts, more important than a boss, more important than other traders because they make up half of the business in terms of implementation. So, feel free to joke about whatever you know but I reserve the right to not further comment on your unqualified opinions, unless you start to educate yourself what is really going on in this arena.
Come on, you know that's not right.
Some coders may earn higher bases than a VP level traders, but it stops there.
There are plenty of SVP, Director, & MD level traders, but zero tech guys at that level.
P.S.: Everyone utilizes open source software components, every systematic trading desk at Goldman, every DMA desk at investment bank xxx(fill in the blank) EXACTLY BECAUSE it provides huge shortcuts, saved time and avoided bugs because it has been developed and tested by many users. Gosh you start to make me laugh because you make yourself sound truly stupid.
My point is that the open source parts of trading systems are the utility parts, only. Generic infrastructure.
The value added part is the strategy. That's the elegant part, and it's usually more pricing & microstructure related than tech/latency/architecture, and often not that many lines of code.
There's no open source quoting strategy that's worth anything.
And yes, infrastructure does not account for the profitability side of systematic trading but very much does it account for avoiding HUGE losses, losses that can cost an invaluable amount in goodwill, trust, regulatory sanctions, trading halts, customer defections, above potentially costly losses that could close down a whole trading desk.
Agreed. Same with any other generic banking IT. Credit card processing systems <yawn>, ATM networks <yawn>, payroll processing systems ... That's why it's outsourced to ChIndia.
No value added. Just a cost of doing business.
