That's quite impressive! I work in an investment bank (my team is the only one that sits on the trading floor) developing low latency systems in Java. I get around 65K pre-tax in salary and bonus is not even 10K (I have about 4.5 years of Java experience and started working on this job about 2 years ago).

I have been interested in moving to a hedge fund for a while and even had a telephone interview with one of them. I thought I did really well and it did seem like they agreed with me in their feedback to my recruiter but they also declared that "while I was an outstanding candidate, I was not what they are looking for and will come back to me once they have a more suitable role". I just don't understand what that means. From chatter with recruiters and friends, your best change of getting into a hedge fund is through personal contacts. Can you confirm this theory?