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
@lo_tech
MM. HFT. Views probably someone else's.
Joined March 2013
- 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
- Replying to @DenisPitcher100%. Add the effect of bolting new systems acquired through merging desks, teams and acquisitions and, bingo. System spaghetti.
- Replying to @abcampbellIf only there was a burgeoning alternative set of composable financial systems.
- What's the worst manual trading error you've seen on a desk?
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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*,
- 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
- 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: ๐
- 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
- 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


