Anyone else worked at some and have personal knowledge of the culture there?
>Tons of standing desks >Every trader surrounded by 8 or even 12 monitors >Extravagant dinners with $1,000+ bottles of wine >Trips to the casino to count cards
>CEO gives speeches sometimes >Is a weird libertarian dude who professes views that are very anti-consumerist and anti-poor people, I won't get into detail because it will reveal information that can identify him >Thinks his firm contributes an extremely valuable service to society and acts as if it's almost a charity organization doing good in the world, despite extracting wealth from the market through high frequency trading algorithms and even algorithms meant to exploit the algorithms of other firms
>Very elitist, lots of my co-workers would often randomly bring up their time at MIT or Harvard when it's barely relevant, just because they wanted to mention the fact that they went there again
I don't like places like this, luckily I'm in low latency server engineering, not trading, so I moved out of this industry elsewhere and the pay is much better and people are less elitist, but it's a relief to know that there's always a demand for people like me in prop trading if I ever lost my job etc. I could easily get a new one
looks like this thread will probably go unnoticed, so ill ask a question anyway. did the office go crazy when the markets open? were there ever co-workers shouting at each other during heavy market volatility?
Jose Collins
Hypercompetitive
Unironically pretty brilliant people
Many can easily start their own fin service or fintech and succeed. Many in fact.
I live in los angeles, and they pretty much line across all the prime beachfront office properties
Legitimate all around. Your best bet is to know ur shit, have cfa, and also be a great salesperson.
Alexander Bennett
Did you overhear anyone planning to put their bonus check in bitcoin?
Cameron Jenkins
I wasn't on the trading floor very often, but it's actually pretty quiet most of the time and self contained. People would listen to music and try to get into a "zone" but for instance the AAPL traders would have their desks next to each other and the oil traders would do similar so they could converse. The only full-floor craziness was market-opening ceremonies which involved some funny memes but I can't reveal them or it would reveal the firm
Joshua Bell
can you drop some tools of the trade? im trying to get into this shit as i have a shit load of time and a 30k to fuck around with
Julian Gutierrez
This is actually one of the biggest regrets of my life. I worked there for a short period but I was not a trader, I was in software. So I didn't fully have an investment mindset yet. But they actually paid {VERY_PROMINENT_NOW-BILLIOANRE_BITCOIN_INVESTOR} to come give a talk on Bitcoin and it was my first real exposure to it except vaguely reading about it on articles. I should have dumped all my money into it then and I would have made big money. The sentiment was very positive, this is part of the reason I am now so pro-crypto, because this trading firm was so pro-crypto as well
Jason James
I have 6 years experience with big data and ETL systems but want to get into more runtime/low latency systems. Any good reading material? Can you describe your high frequency trading backend tech stack a bit?
Luke Clark
Sorry don't bother is my advice. You can't compete.
Camden Myers
I know a firm that invested 1% if their funds into bitcoin back in 2014.
They sold at 10k.
Unironically made a fucking fortune.
Joshua Cox
I suggest learning C and C++ very heavily, C++ is the primary language used in low latency servers. Understand everything that's going on under the hood, make sure you have the full knowledge of a CS Bachelor's from a top university with regards to algorithmic complexity and systems level optimization, OS internals, things like this
Understand low level optimization like C++ template metaprogramming, optimizing for cache coherency, tricks to avoid all locking operations like malloc such as using custom allocators, never writing when not necessary, never reading when not necessary, etc.
David Roberts
>implying
you dont know me but ok
Chase Collins
Also understand program correctness and undefined behavior well, and traditional design patterns. Not only do these servers have to be fast, but they have to be perfect because one computational error or one crash can unironically cost the firm millions, so yeah you're trying to squeeze everything you can out of every cycle, but you can't do ugly shit like goto or weird pointer manipulations without it being extremely well defined and wrapped in very safe interfaces
You have $30k user get a grip
Gabriel Jenkins
I understand most of that but I'm fairly rusty. I heard most high frequency trading firms have written their own memory pool implementations. I know C/C++ at university level but I'm unfamiliar with some of the new improvements to C++ and totally unfamiliar with standard libraries. We do high frequency bidding on online adspace at which also has low latency requirements (
Adam Baker
>having a full CS degree from a high tier school >algorithms >low level engineering this keeps me from even trying to go into app dev or web dev, I'm turning 28 and will get my ass plated and handed to me by every 25 year odl who graduated cs and got a job
Oliver Foster
Go get a CS degree user, age discrimination doesn't happen at many firms, some of my co-workers are at the entry level and they are in their 30s, they just want good workers who know their stuff, but it depends on the company
Isaac Scott
I suck at math, and have a friend in app dev (c#/.net) who says he will train me if i study for 3 months before, also considering a c# bootcamp
Angel Fisher
That's okay I guess but you'll only get a shitty $50k job making websites and enterprise software for big companies that don't actually specialize in software, you won't be able to break into low latency serving of any sort, let alone trading
Jaxon Martin
can you give any benchmarks?
like what lowest usec you ever achieves for like TCP / UDP ? your best hit rate? maximum PPS ?
I can't give any info about the company I currently work at to that level of detail for non-disclosure agreement reasons, and also networking itself is not my specialty and we don't work at that level of abstraction on my team, we primarily work in optimizing ML algos themselves, and our networking stack is very mature and handled by other teams already
Wyatt Morris
Thanks for the full reply to my meme question. Don't worry about missing out, you don't want to live life with cheat codes.
Benjamin Murphy
Look user you don't have enough capital to make any money in algo trading. That's not enough money to even pay a yearly subscription to get realtime market data from a large exchange or even to buy the networking equipment required to accept that amount of data at low latencies, I'm not insulting you I'm giving you technical details, $30k is not enough to play around with
Josiah Anderson
dude, you need 100k a month just for dataservices than 30k a month just for high speed tunneled internet
>30 year old boomer, exited chemistry for ground level finance position, licensed to buy/sell securities, shooting for CFA and equities analyst, my firm want's CS degrees so considering going for CS masters
Do I have a shot at getting on that trading floor or am I fucked?
Thomas Myers
You have to have a CS Bachelor's not a half-Chemistry Bachelor's and a CS Master's. Any university that lets you get a CS Master's without a CS Bachelor's or extensive industry software engineering experience of some sort is a shit tier university whose prestige won't hold up at a trading firm
There is no shortcut okay, Bachelor's in CS from respectable university, lots of self studying (I basically went incel monk mode my entire time in college studying all the time) and you have to have personal projects that shot off your low level C++ skills like an optimized compiler or CPU emulator
Asher Fisher
awww, well you prob cant answer anything am having ask then :(
your firm sounds very big though nice on that can you atleast kinda hit at the main tactic the predatory side of your algo uses to find targets?
Oliver Ramirez
providing instant liquidity is an incredibly valuable service you fucking brainlet
Ryder Murphy
Wish I didn't waste my time with chemistry. Oh well. I can still afford some rope on my salary.
Cooper Davis
Sorry I can't for obvious legal reasons, and I don't work there anymore
Providing instant liquidity is a side-effect not the intent. The government could for implement laws which require companies to act as their own market makers or delegate market making responsibilities to provide liquidity as well. This is not the same thing as extracting wealth from the market via exploiting inefficiencies even though it achieves the same thing.
Carson Green
my friend makes 100k without a degree doing c# apps, a lot of web devs easily clear 50k as well. B
Besides, for me, 50k/year would be living pretty high on the horse. I am making an 18/hr now doing back breaking shit and it is the most I have ever earned.
