Re:The Accidental HFT Firm
by SkipperCat on Saturday June 10, 2023 @10:02AM
(#36270531)
The cost of writing software isn't as horrible as the cost of colocating in the various financial exchanges. The market data feed costs are massive and you really need to make a significant amount of money trading just to cover the infrastructure costs.
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Re:The Accidental HFT Firm
by thr_low_latency on Saturday June 10, 2023 @12:11PM
(#36271754)
The salaries of the people doing this sort of thing start at mid six figures out of university and go up substantially from there.
Compensation for employees in HFT tend to be extremely high. Employee comp number one cost for any trading firm.
Re:The Accidental HFT Firm
by SkipperCat on Saturday June 10, 2023 @05:24PM
(#36275269)
Yes, the cost is very high. But the cost of an good software engineer at Google, Facebook or another top tier firm is also very high.
However, when Google buys a WAN link from NYC to CHI, they pay $XX dollars because they don't care about the latency too much. When a HFT buys that same link, they'll spend three times that much just to get a link that is a few milliseconds faster.
Also, the colocation costs at the major exchanges (NASDAQ, NYSE, CBOE) are insane. A cabinet in one of those data centers can be 3x as much as a cabinet somewhere else.
I guess what I'm saying is there are a lot things in the HFT world where you have to spend a lot more money than you would if you were doing similar amounts of work at any other tech firm.