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Ask HN: Any engineers interested in HFT?

3 points by cluda01 ↗ HN
I currently work for an exchange and starting an algorithmic trading company has always intrigued me. Is anyone else in a similar situation?

For example, are you in an adjacent market working for somebody else and thought about going off on your own?

6 comments

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grails4life
These statistical arbitrage trading strategies dont work. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Focus on creating value, and not just swaping it around.
eof
It's not really fair to say such a general statement, because clearly some of them do, sometimes the market won't stay irrational (or it will work irrationally in your favor) for too long, etc.

However, focusing on creating value is a much more sure bet and more rewarding in the end. I don't want to go off in a long tangent in what will likely be a dead thread, but years of playing poker for a living really taught me this lesson.

The truly happy people I know all create tremendous amounts of value. While most of them aren't 'rich' they definitely live lives of abundance.

grails4life
Yes of these strategies "work" for a while by taking advantage of pricing anomalies and multiplying the difference a million times over. The problem is in order to make a decent return with this approach you have to be heavily leveraged, and eventually when the tail outcome on the bad side occurs, you lose your ass, as in LTCM.
yourabi
I'm not interested in HFT specifically but I have been looking around for a good cheap-ish market data feed to do automated screening / analysis
iworkforthem
Yahoo Finance is a cheap-ish option, you can download the day's High, Low, Open, Close and Volume for almost all of the stocks out there. Being cheap-ish, sometimes data does skipped a day or month.
yourabi
I'm really interested in Options data (not just equity data)