brownegg

Most solutions of this type are an order of magnitude higher than that. It's very easy to spend $20k/mo.

To give an idea of scale / endpoint, a top-tier HFT infrastructure costs on the order of $100k/day. There are probably only a half dozen total of those in the world, though.

As a rule, downvotes with no explanation really suck.

I meant this comment sincerely, and thought it worth reading. I'm quite willing to be wrong and learn, but I don't get anything from a bunch of -1s (given that I observed the no one-liners, no jokes, etc. rules).

Jus' sayin'.

My complaint is not that said people (those who said no one could compete on price) are wrong, but that they totally miss the point. No one buys Apple products because they're cheaper.

These tablets look great, in terms of pricing and specs. But what will drive their success or lack thereof is the tightness and consistency of the overall experience. This is what Apple gets so well, even though delivering it flies in the face of so many things (lack of openness, vendor lock-in, app store approval policies, etc.).

Why is it necessary that the product demand "hours and hours"? I don't have a Facebook account because I simply see no need to be bombarded with invitations, connections, "friends", etc.

I specifically WANT something people just use to stay connected in a way they find palatable. Almost by definition anything that people obsess over will never have me as a member.

I can't be the only one.

I see this "the iPad is too heavy to comfortably read" comment a lot. I have had an iPad v1 for all of 5 days, but in that time I have read more "long-form" material than the previous five months.

Too heavy? C'mon, really? Yes, it's heavier than a Nook. But to say the iPad is useless is hyperbole at best and misleading at worst.

True, but it's not just the fact that it's a common (and often garbage) claim--it's also about the relative worth if it's proven true.

I mean, if I could really get C performance out of SBCL (and for my purposes, I can't), I'd sure as hell want to know.

Think cold fusion. Sure, "wolf" has been cried a lot of times, but you're still going to want to know as soon as it happens "for real".

Probably get downvoted for this, but as a longtime resident of Chicago who literally lives on the same block as Giordano's, why anyone would look for Chicago-style pizza anywhere, including Chicago, is beyond me.

As good as San Francisco's baking culture is, surely there's NY-style (real! :)) pizza to be had?

Maybe. Manual memory allocation is no longer a best practice for "normal" C++ projects, and I'm not sure how much easier C#'s syntax for higher-level abstractions is relative to template metaprogramming. Both are convoluted, obviously.

While I agree, what's maybe more interesting is that a community of Java users would "do it all over again". Could be blub programmers not being able to see up the chain, could be normal human comfort tendencies, but it could also be "legit".

Most of the comments seem a bit critical. I don't think the author is naively suggesting "this needs to be better@#!!!". Not all ideas have to be practical or even feasible; it's beneficial to at least consider everything. The payoff on a truly new / useful abstraction could be huge. Think of C with / without the preprocessor.

Or take a language like Scala, which I happen to like a lot, but has one hellaciously complex type system: how much would it benefit from an additional syntax abstraction? This question is worth asking!

I like the columns of code idea a lot, and it's something I've thought about for a long time. But my conclusion so far is that this is actually better done with IDE functionality. Just establish a common annotation for metadata which IDEs interpret as a display configuration. Or have the IDE open a .src file and a .doc file in the same directory, displayed side by side. The doc file has the same line count as the .src file, and there are conventions / macros / etc. that make use of the second column, etc. (Of course the .doc could be compressed into some kind of metadata file when stored.)

To bring it back to the topic, aren't we all REALLY interested in something that makes coding... just, better?

Forget HFT by yourself, at least until you've done some things and learned what it really requires. The barriers to entry are multiple and substantial, and you can't figure out how to eliminate one unless you're really good with the others.

Like any substantial / difficult / well-rewarded pursuit, plan on this taking 12+ months to be even minimally viable.

Minimum viable product = Interactive Brokers account, automated via one of their API wrappers, with custom logic. This will get you to where you can modify orders ~ 10x per second, which is often enough that you're going to learn so much you don't even know what the questions are yet....

If you do all that and want to press forward, usually the next correct step (again assuming you're writing ALL the logic, risk handling, etc.) is something like Lime.

"backtest my algorithms"... historical data isn't free, nor is any decent source of it

"execute trades quickly"... what's the definition of quickly? there are systems currently active that can process an execution and have a response on the wire in less than 25us... that's 25 millionths of a second for wire-to-wire processing...

Realize this: you are expressing a desire to play one of the most difficult games on the planet. In this game you do not get to choose your opponents. However, you can know that it's very, very unlikely that you know or can do anything they don't or can't.

Do not quit school. What looks expensive (in terms of time, money, and effort) now will look incredibly cheap later.

"Lots of people have done great without a degree," is crap. Lots of people make $1m+ / yr dunking basketballs, too.

It is more than ok to reinvent the wheel. What if the guy who invented the wheel hadn't reinvented the block?

They're not, really. Not on the HFT landscape, anyway. It's tempting to say they're being slept on, but the cream rises to the top VERY fast in HFT--there have been multiple instances of products brought to market and the company being purchased outright by the first would-be customer (although this is much, much more frequent on the networking and hardware sides).

I think the analysis and borderline-accusation of what is termed "insincere quoting" by the exchanges is... laughable. It doesn't speak well to the authors' knowledge of their industry. I've had an exchange disconnect my session for sending 1000+ orders per second by myself, and I would have been quite happy to execute any of them (or else they wouldn't have been sent). To be honest, I'm surprised 5000 is the biggest number they could find. I would have guess an order of magnitude higher.

What happened on 5/6 was that the NYSE finally learned that they aren't the boss in the equities markets anymore. Trying to slow down trading without regard for the other routing destinations was nothing but quaint.

You know those videos you see of suburban shoppers at 6:00a on Black Friday, rushing through the doors to get one of the three available Xbox 360s or whatever? The NYSE was the hapless security guard whose watch was slow telling everyone the store wasn't open yet.

I know HN frowns on "me too" posts, but Harris' book is the first to read for anyone wanting to get into the trading business. It's good enough that it deserves another recommendation.

To be honest, this surprises me a lot. I'm not a professional programmer, for some definition of same; but I do write a great deal of code and make my living from using and maintaining it.

And for me, saying

foo = bar<baz ? 42 : 0;

is really quite nice.

It's crucial, for sure. But there are trades for which it is the only determinant, and those are dangerous waters.

There are market participants who make their money on pure latency arbitrage; it is a 100% speed game (because anyone can figure out that 1 - 1 = 0).

The majority of HFT falls into the "you have to be fast enough to not get run over" bucket.

Completely untrue. Pure speed games are "winner take most", and brutally difficult. It is very hard to win on speed.

Sure, you can get the point where you're placing trades for a couple hundred grand... as long as a lot of things fall into place for you. Writing your own apps? Unless you think you can get talent that is willing to roll the dice and possibly be out of a job in a couple months, you're looking at 12 months x the cost of those people... how much is that? $500k? This isn't framework-style assembly of components. If you want to be competitive, the SLOWEST things you can use are linux and C++.

Colocation agreements usually require a minimum commitment of 12-36 months... probably $10k/mo if you have some rudimentary failover and the like.

I'd say anyone who tries with less than 12 months and $500k to truly burn has 0 shot at success. And if you want to really do it right, you're looking at an order of magnitude more.

You make the assumption that they would trade. That assumption is only valid because of people like me.

I don't need to justify my activity, nor do I want to go that route--my point is that the fact that participants can realistically expect a fill is not something that happens because of magic.

I am a professional trader, and by almost any definition I operate in the "high frequency" space. First, let's establish that Traders is an authority on the real world of financial markets in the same sense that PC World is an authority in the world of technology.

So I've not read the linked article, nor am I going to. But I will say this: HFT does perform a viable, necessary economic function. A well-functioning capital market absolutely requires this kind of activity.

HOWEVER, like most mainstream-media memes, what gets talked about / opined on is almost never relevant to what is actually important and/or controversial: in this case, the question of whether HFT creates a two-tiered playing field where individual (read: non-technically-sophisticated) investors suffer at the hands of the "pros".

Most arguments against HFT basically say that algorithms are purely predatory and only serve to hurt the performance of large investors. This is naive at best and deceptive at worst; for every share I purchase "ahead of" a big order, a seller has been filled at the price he desired. Every transaction has two sides; you can't just pick one and say they got screwed. The other side has to have done as well as the other did poorly (assuming a fictional frictionless world).

The reality is that HFT requires tons of knowledge and a technology budget of seven figures per annum at the barest minimum, and this provides a very real barrier to entry. What should be talked about, but never is: is that ok? Why or why not? What ramifications does it have?

In current events conversations, participants can usefully be divided into "those who read the Economist", and "other."

There isn't a better magazine, period. And I'm not a banker, or a Tory. I am just under 40 though.

I'm a total foodie, and I simply cannot read this book. I'm not sure if I need pretty pictures, or salacious kitchen anecdotes, or what, but I read a lot of food books and I've failed to get past pg. 30 on this one several times.

For a time, I considered this my bible. But it's too idealistic, and goes a long way on some fairly iffy assumptions.

It's still compelling as hell, though.

www.linuxfromscratch.org

I took a p4 2.4ghz w/ 1gb ram out of the closet and have been partitioning, compiling, bootstrapping, to my heart's content. To be honest, working with a super minimal system at the cli is a lot like coding in all caps on my old Apple II+.