Tim Meggs (@TimMeggs) / X

Tim Meggs

998 posts

Tim Meggs

@TimMeggs

@lo_tech MM. HFT. Views probably someone else's.

Joined March 2013

Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 21, 2024
I've worked in a bank (10yrs), a hedge fund (6yrs) and in HFTs (4yrs). Two things: 1. Yes, I'm old 2. You be amazed - stunned - by the number of premium name counterparties whose polished branding and external image belies a myriad of internal 'systems' that are held together
3.1M
Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Feb 4, 2024
The Missing Quant. True story. First trading desk I worked on. Bank. Prop equity derivs. Me, 25, junior as f. We had a stat arb team as part of the group. Three traders, one quant. The quant was a mad bloke. Unintentionally hilarious. He had one PhD and left academia in the
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 22, 2024
Replying to @DenisPitcher
100%. Add the effect of bolting new systems acquired through merging desks, teams and acquisitions and, bingo. System spaghetti.
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 22, 2024
Replying to @abcampbell
If only there was a burgeoning alternative set of composable financial systems.
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Mar 1, 2024
What's the worst manual trading error you've seen on a desk?
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Mar 9, 2024
Most of the bank quants I met in my career were physics background. Even complex financial math was trivial for most of them. I often wonder if this fact contributed to the ballooning complexity of credit derivs in the early '00s i.e. let's do this synthetic CDO^2, not because
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 23, 2024
Bank trading floors are either 'run' by Sales or Trading. Each side usually thinks the other is a waste of space: "you don't understand the risks in the products" Trading to Sales "a computer can do your job" Sales to Trading The truth, of course, is they are symbiotic. No
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 21, 2024
Replying to @TradingDutchman
This.
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 13, 2024
Raw MM (no alpha in theo) shouldn't be thought of as a trading strategy at all - it's a service. And not a "service" in the sense of the MM-as-a-service deals that token issuers enter into with mms, no. A raw MM provides a service to all users of a market; that service being
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Mar 31, 2024
Spent a career trading derivatives and building systems that do it well.* Know that I love about it? The details. Every exchange, every contract is different. Details are table stakes for not getting a rude awakening from the market. And in those details you might, *might*,
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 18, 2024
I wake up, I think about market making I wake up, I'm think about microstructure I wake up, I think about the interaction of two (or more) derivatives at microsecond resolution across AWS zones. I'm not normal
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Mar 14, 2024
Wife: space-time is cool. What would you do if you could travel at the speed of light? Me: manually run arbs between geographically dispersed financial centres Wife: 😒
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Jan 15, 2024
Pssst. Wanna know a secret? The most valuable thing you can bring to a quantitative trading role, and which will get you further and serve you longer, is definitely NOT your pure quant skills. Rather, the ability to hold in your head, interrogate and explain, two or three
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Tim Meggs
@TimMeggs
Feb 2, 2024
The best quants I've worked with - and I've worked with a lot - almost always have active interests (physical, mental, or mixed) that fill their head space on the daily way more than the maths/finance they're paid to do. Something something creative thinking something something
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