geekitarian

A few good trading blogs worth checking out: Felix Salmon's blog - http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ blog with a business basis, contains useful news on trading and regulation. Quantitative Trading - http://epchan.blogspot.com/ Ernie Chan's blog, author of Quantitative Trading - blog with a strategy basis. Coding the Markets - http://etrading.wordpress.com/ Good blog with more of a technical basis, and good book recommendations.

How quickly can your developers create a trading system to meet your needs? The creation of software is a task that is almost always underestimated. It can take weeks to make simple changes. Because many strategies are time sensitive - it doesn't do any good to be the second in line to a one-time opportunity - it’s important to be able to get to market quickly. Working with new technologies always reduces a developer's initial productivity. This ramp-up time can mean that somebody else is beating your strategy to market. Working with a team of experts, who have deployed and customized trading software before is almost always going to be the most time-sensitive manner to create a new automated trading strategy. There are plenty of reasons to consider purchasing an off-the-shelf or customizable platform. For instance, personnel turnover can have an impact. What do you do when you've hired a developer that works on your system for 6 months, and then leaves you beca...

Four terms that you hear over and over again in this industry: High Frequency Trading Low Latency Trading Algorithmic Trading Black Box Trading A lot of traders (and publications) use these terms interchangeably - but these terms refer to different (though related) topics. High Frequency Trading : Placing a lot of orders in a short time period. Usually this term implies short-lived positions of a few minutes to less than a second (sometimes less than a millisecond). High frequency trading is all about making a lot of small profits, not buying one instrument and holding it for 2 years before cashing in. High frequency traders (or, rather, their systems) buy and sell quickly and frequently. This means that high freqency trading can make a lot of money very quickly, but it also means that without proper risk controls, high frequency trading can lose a lot of money very quickly. Algorithmic Trading : Trading that leverages computing technology for analysis, support, assistanc...

This is one of Henry Ford's most famous quotes. Over a hundred years ago, people got from place to place on a four-legged beast and weren't exactly imaginative about innovations in transportation technology. Nowadays, people in the high frequency trading space are in the same place. If you ask high frequency traders what they want, a lot of them would say simply, "Faster Algorithms." All things being equal, everybody wants their systems to run faster. This isn't just in high frequency trading - this goes for engineering, medicine, hell - even my grandma would like to get to her Solitaire game a bit more quickly. There's always this question of speed in high frequency trading - but I'm not convinced that you have to have the fastest system or lowest latency connectivity out there. "Fast enough" is good enough. The question that a high frequency trader should be asking isn't, "How fast can I make this?" but instead, "How ...