What Programming Language For Trading Jobs ?

[conduit]

sorry I brought you down, I just try to be brutally honest. Most with a laissez faire attitude just don't make it in most financial firms. There were 250'000 students who applied for Goldman internships just recently. The street is littered with resumes of applicants wanting entry level as well as experienced positions. If you want the softy, touchy, nice, polite attitude then go and apply for a job at the next door furniture store or auto salon.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-careers-total-job-applications-for-2016-2016-6

This conduit guy seems like a bit of a debby downer.

Anyway...from someone that actually works in finance and i still learning to code...

If you have a lot of time on your hands now (you mentioned 6+) then perhaps learn C##, it is one of the more difficult languages to learn but will give you a stronger base. That said, this is usually learnt by real programmers rather than used in finance so I only suggest that if you have a lot of free time to do this and you want to stand out. For strictly finance purposes python will be your best bet (what I am learning) as it's the most useful and has the most resources for finance. It can also be linked to R nicely which is great for analysing large data sets.

 

[MrMuppet]

@conduit: THIS!

IMO you have to ask yourself the question what you can bring to the table.
Finance firms either want highly experienced and specialised people and as a grad you are not one of them. Or they are looking for bendable, "educatable" and moldable waterboys which are dime in a dozen.

The OP is basically a victim to the greatest bubble in centuries namely the education bubble. Just everyone went to graduate and took loans in order to do so, just because their parents told them it was a good idea.
30 years ago it was, because highly educated people were rare.
Now you have a truckton of people who know how to model a jump diffusion process and everyone is looking for a job. Over a dozen of my friends stayed in university in order to do their Ph.D.'s because the job market was not "favourable" 5 years ago. Now they finished and complain about the fact that they studien almost ten years to get paid so little in their entry positions. If that doesn't ring your bell, I don't know what does.

I wont be surprised when in ten years plumbers are driving lamborginis because there is just noone who can fix a toilet.

If you really want a job in finance and you haven't won a nobel price yet or don't have Wall Street pedigree, your only chance is networking and making a couple of friends who haul you in.

Sorry to bust your dreams bro, but your first lesson should be simple economics, namely supply and demand. Everyone would like to suck on Wall Streets tits for the 80hr weeks and the fat paychecks. So do you really think you can defeat your competition by learning how to code??

 

[IAS_LLC]

For the people suggesting assembly for speed....do you actually know of anyone still writing assembly? C/C++ compilers are pretty damn good these days....if you really need speed, you probably need an FPGA....so learn VHDL

 

[Low Salubrity Thug]

For the people suggesting assembly for speed....do you actually know of anyone still writing assembly? C/C++ compilers are pretty damn good these days....if you really need speed, you probably need an FPGA....so learn VHDL

Yep, I know a C programmer working at a commodities MM here in London who occasionally drops down to assembly to optimise routines for specific processor instruction sets. C compilers have come a long way but by their very nature there will always be optimisations available.

FPGAs are great if your requirements rarely change and it's feasible to condense your logic into VHDL in a timely manner. Like everything, they have their place. Not entirely practical if you are doing R&D or need a quick turnaround though.

 

[IAS_LLC]

Interesting. I usually only look at assembly for debugging and verification that the compiler optimizations are doing what I think they are. Thanks for the info!

 

[Low Salubrity Thug]

Interesting. I usually only look at assembly for debugging and verification that the compiler optimizations are doing what I think they are. Thanks for the info!

Yep. I think that's how the vast majority of coders are exposed to assembly these days. I mean, I can quite happily read it, but can't remember the last time I wrote any. Only people working in very niche areas are concerned with coding it. And even then they only consider it once they have exhausted all the (much more productive) kernel bypass optimisations etc.

 

[userque]

In addition to the above-mentioned. Machine code/Assembly is also used for cracking software. So, you probably won't know, that you know someone that uses it for that purpose.

 

[Turveyd]

You were 12 when you learned to code and by self proclamation you are old now. So in 40 or 50 years the best language you found was VB. Net?

No vb6 much faster to Dev and install on PCs, .NET only for web apps.

Tried a few others, not as good, .net takes atleast 4xs longer to code the same thing and its not as good, which is just sad.

 

[Low Salubrity Thug]

No vb6 much faster to Dev and install on PCs, .NET only for web apps.

Tried a few others, not as good, .net takes atleast 4xs longer to code the same thing and its not as good, which is just sad.

This is one of the most laughable posts I've seen on these boards. And I've seen a few. Thanks for the chuckle.

 

[Turveyd]

In addition to the above-mentioned. Machine code/Assembly is also used for cracking software. So, you probably won't know, that you know someone that uses it for that purpose.

I miss assembly, only the best of the best could handle it, new stuff lowering the requirement big time.

6502 C64 and BBC
6809 dragin 32
Z80a spectrum
Then 68020 Amiga.