Ask HN: Information of tech stack used by hedge funds and stock exchanges

5 points·Frzshk··3 comments

Hello,

I want to expand my knowledge beyond buy and sell orders.

So, What goes on behind the scenes for stock management ?

And a follow up question What tech stack do hedge funds or high frequency trading firms use ?

I think there is a lot of variety in the space depending on what type of fund and what time scales they work on. HFT will have FPGAS almost certainly. Crypto funds generally don’t have the same time constraints (yet) and are becoming more cloud native but it’s not just crypto funds that are on the cloud: e.g. https://medium.com/prooftrading/proof-engineering-the-algori... . I think most traditional hedge funds still collocate with the exchanges they trade with. Crypto funds tend to be more distributed and figure out which “link” is the fastest to their exchange of choice.

Programming language wise I think the most common ones are: C++, Java, C# (there are some strange window native shops out there)

Hardware: FPGA, Solarflare cards (moves part of the network stack out of the kernel space to user space to reduce context switching and reduce latency)

Heavy use of C++ and FPGAs really.

I know of one exchange that had a generic matching engine that used C++ meta programming to suit different markets.