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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

I've heard rumours about a high-frequency trading shop doing that, too

That seems wrong to me, I would hardly consider HFT to be a critical infrastructure. They should be sending most of those employees home.

Well, can all agree that HFTs think very highly of themselves, and thus self-identifying as critical is unsurprising if dubious?

HFT should be banned and there should be a 15 minute delay before trade execution.

And that delay should be randomized.

That's a beautiful solution, hadn't considered that. You would instantly take almost all the wind out of their sails, with a simple random delay.

Weird. Can't they work from home?

Most home offices don't have 16 displays attached to the desk

mine would if I made that kind of money.

I'm waiting for someone to bring the vertically curved video slot machine displays to market for general use. Those would make a nice personal command center.

16 displays so you can save the time it would take you to switch desktops and physically move your chair around to look at different windows instead? I bet it looks really fancy and cool.

I was mostly kidding, though they do tend to have what amounts to a videowall attached to the trading desks from what I've seen in photos shared by friends working in HFT.

What I suspect is a larger barrier is their paranoia. It'd surprise me if any HFT firm was comfortable with equipping the homes of its traders with everything needed from the bespoke software to appropriate hardware etc. They're very protective of their trade secrets and wouldn't want that stuff sitting around in the homes of employees where it can be either copied or otherwise scrutinized.

I have an acquaintance who’s a trader and the company had installed a 16-display rig in their house last week (London).

That's more for someone doing the trading than someone designing the trading robot (HFT).

There might be latency issues. Although I'd expect that any decisions which are being made which require such latency are automated decisions running on a on-prem machine anyway...

Need folks on-site to manage the on-premises machines in case of outage.

My firm (options market making, not exactly HFT, but close) has most people working from home successfully, but some are having problems with flaky internet. If I was the owner of a big shop I would probably want at least a skeleton crew in the office. A regional Comcast outage could easily take 90% of the remote employees offline.

The same risk would seem to apply to most Silicon Valley oncall rotations every night.

Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?

Especially since, in times of market turmoil, HFT's are an important market participant. Someone needs to catch the knives.

Also they're probably having their most profitable periods since 2008, so I'd imagine there's a lot of incentive (for employees and owners) to keep trading whenever possible.

> Weird to single out HFT's. Isn't everyone working from home right now?

“That” in parent comment is being sequestered at work, so the opposite of working from home.

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