Capital Markets Devs

y-you are actually r-r-right. Just managing McDolands cash system.

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If you're young and have a CS degree, apply for any junior tech job at an investment bank and you can find your way to it from there.

This guy understands.

There's a lot less secret sauce then you might think. Lots of stuff to talk about that's not really proprietary. Surprised there aren't more people on Jow Forums in this field desu.

>There's a lot less secret sauce then you might think. Lots of stuff to talk about that's not really proprietary. Surprised there aren't more people on Jow Forums in this field desu.
Then start talking or your thread will die

>Working for an investment bank.
You poor fool.

Here's an example. A lot of what we do is just aggregating all the prices the other banks are showing us. There's no magic machine learning or super quant also that tells us info about market direction. We just want to jam all those prices together in a timely manner, even when the market is super busy and those prices are moving fast.

It's not terrible. I work 9:30-5 most days and make almost 200k. It's soul crushing in many ways though.

>A lot of what we do is just aggregating all the prices the other banks are showing us.
So how do you make a profit?

Sounds cool. This is for identifying signals I guess? I don't do a lot of quant-y things, mostly performance and market microstructure stuff. Can you talk more about it without getting sacked?

A few ways. We mark up the price the clients see (institutional and corporate fx clients), so that even if we just take the other banks price to hedge we still make something. Other times you can make money off flow, i.e you have two clients who do offsetting trades in a small time window, and you get to capture the bid-ask spread, no need to hedge. Sometimes we also hold positions, either because we have a belief about the direction of the market in the near term, or because we are hoping another bank will trade against the price we are showing them, thereby taking us out of our position without us having to pay the spread another bank is showing us.

Isnt showing them non-real prices, quasi-illegal?

how much do you make?

How are the prices not real? If we show them a price, they can trade on it.

>make almost 200k
Funny you even bother counting your lockup towards salary. I hope you don't burn out before then. Although, you probably do have it a bit better than most in the company. Does starting so late mean you don't rent inside the city?

I used to work in the field before moving on to something else.

A few truths about that industry:
* You will generally be well compensated compared to other fields (video games, healthcare or whatever) but you won't become Gordon Gekko. At the end of the day it's a banker's game, and you'll always be a nerd working for them. Don't buy the crap about superstar programmers making 1 million a year. They do exist but it's maybe 0.1%. Most are grunts, considered an expense.
* Generally it's interesting from a technology point of view, but it's not exactly rocket science either. At the end of the day, you're just trying to find ways to be faster at arbitraging between securities. It can be interesting but you're not exactly curing cancer.
* Don't buy the Hollywood hype. You're not going to become a playboy surrounded by models and bottles of Champagne. You'll be a code grunt working with Pajeet and Chang.

Overall I would recommend to work there a few years. It's an industry that do not hesitate to spend on technology, so it's a good way to build up skills. And generally the people working there are quite smart. Just don't buy too much into the hype.

For people wondering if they can do that stuff on their own, from home: no. It costs a fortune to get your computers into the co-location centers, buy the links, have enough capital to trade, etc. There's a reason big banks are the ones doing prop trading, it's a game where you need cash to make cash.

The ones claiming you can do that from home are generally trying to sell you books, software, etc.

Where do I find people like you when I (know what I) want more bespoke charting?