More straightforward, heh, sure. But still damnably complicated. Which just goes to show how much money and how much engineering talent is invested in this world that these things are so taken for granted.
What did bother me, and was acknowledged by my coworkers, was how much top talent was being pulled away from productive tasks to essentially wank around. Not just technologists either, but all sorts of mathematicians and scientists were drawn to the flame.
We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. It’s enough to make one want to give up on capitalism, except that everything else appears to be worse.
There is 0 social impact. That’s the downside of course - but hey, how many jobs out there are really having any kind of positive social impact ? Not 0, but close to it.
Intraday financial games are zero-sum. What HFTs gain, they leech away from mutual funds and pension funds and retail investors and market makers who operate over a longer horizon.
Regarding social impact, the world does have some demand for liquidity and price discovery. Providing those services is both essential and extremely difficult. It's definitely not the most social good I could be doing with my talents, but I think it's weakly positive.
Those things have driven a load of proprietary and open source tech that helps everyone else.
That depends on how you measure it.
Obviously this would mean that countries that previously relied on subsidised labour from those third world countries would have to start paying up. I'm not suggesting that it is a zero sum game however.
The problem with ads is not that they're useless, it's that it is an industry prone to scams and grift. (Because doing advertising right requires all sorts of actual science, and ain't nobody got time for that when there's money to be made.)
t. Worked for 20 years and adtech.
It's nothing to do with "we as a society". I'm a quant trader and know many others, and the vast majority are in the industry because we care about making money not some leftist save the world crap. Even if socialists managed to completely destroy the financial market, we'd just find another way to make money without trying to save the world (e.g. like the mostly corrupt officials in Russia and China when they were communist). "Society" can't change human nature; even mass brainwashing on the scale attempted by Maoist China failed.
I.e. the best and brightest will always work where they want to work, not where leftists like you want to "allocate" them.
Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.
If you try to exclude greed from the design of your societal system, it will immediately fail. In large numbers, economics shows us that altruistic people wash out of the model and everyone operates in their own self-interest (greed).
> Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.
It's not financial success that precludes someone from commenting on how society is run, it's blatant, deliberate anti-social actions. This is the foundation of a social contract. It's the same reason you'll get locked up if you go around punching people in the face.
Also, I don't think you know what "fascist" means.
It doesn’t seem like fascism to you because you’ve done some mental gymnastics to pretend you’re not just crushing intellectual opposition, but that’s all it is in the end. Op is not punching anyone in the face. He/she is just blatantly unsupportive of socialism.
Please, I want to know; what benefits do the actions of the op have for "societal planning"? The person he was replying to was at least honest in admitting that this behavior "served little social good".
Once again, I think you'd do well to actually read what fascism actually stood for. The propaganda of fascism had a lot more to say about nationalism, "shared history" and the good of corporations than it did to say about things being "anti-social" or even mentioning "selfish greed".
Largely, though I receive 1 or 2 job specs every week for start ups with the keywords 'hft' and 'low latency'. Admittedly there's going to be duplication there if you read them closely.
I think it's a bit of a myth that (ignoring FPGAs) that writing a low-latency software trading system is a time/cost expensive process. Anecdata = I worked at two firms where we did a rewrite from scratch with teams of 5-6 people and traded in the market within 3 months. I'd argue a senior dev that's been around the block a few times could achieve similar when you remove corporate politics, and bikeshedding over design.
The big firm part is paying for multiple quants at $200k++ to come up with strategies and historic market data access for trading models. Small firms are getting backing as long as the co-founders are 'ex-CxO from MegaCorp'.
This depends a lot on the complexity of the trading system and the trading venue specifics. A system to trade single stocks or futures can be built, certified and running in 3 months. A system for options market making will take a lot longer.
The big costs for small firms are historic data (if you don't have any), colo, distance to exchange, and number of connections.
From the number of job specs I see, it feels like the HFT/low latency market place is healthy enough that there are always new firms appearing. It's competitive, so it's hardly surprising that if someone has new ideas they'll find a backer.
The strategies though are where the discovery is. There are a few strategies that are well known and still profitable but those are largely consolidated to the biggest firms. For everything else it’s a discovery process. And done strategies are only profitable for very short regimes.
I miss it sometimes too, but so much has been consolidated it’s largely a big firm world now.