Rimpinths

6 ms·

1.
by Rimpinths 5y ago
I work in the industry too and the things that people mislabel as "front running" is really aggravating. At worst, you could call it "order anticipating": using publicly available knowledge to figure out that if someone
2.
by Rimpinths 5y ago
Great point, and you understand the American stock market better than most Americans. This article was true about 20 years ago, but the author is completely wrong when he says this: "A single market to trade. All stocks for Microsoft (
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by Rimpinths 5y ago
Right. I love to listen to music while coding, but I couldn't listen to a podcast. I've tried, but I can't write words and listen to words at the same time. But music is no problem.
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by Rimpinths 11y ago
Some HFT strategies depend on fragmented exchanges. Look up "latency arbitrage" for examples.
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by Rimpinths 11y ago
I've seen this type of behavior described as "order anticipation", which I think is a much better term. "Front running" means that you are using confidential information that an order will be submitted. "Order
6.
by Rimpinths 11y ago
Does this remind anybody of the CueCat? Same story...subsidized hardware that hackers repurposed for other uses. I think the makers of CueCat tried to unsuccessfully sue the hackers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
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by Rimpinths 11y ago
But they are comparing sales per employee, not market cap per employee.
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by Rimpinths 12y ago
What you should really admire is Amazon's shareholders' tolerance for failure. A lot more companies would be more likely to take big risks like Amazon if their shareholders would tolerate year after year of losses. Time will tell
9.
by Rimpinths 13y ago
I'm reluctant to get involved in the politically incorrect side of this argument, but FWIW, that stat comes from "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns", which was a paper published in the mid-90s by the American Psychological As
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
They boasted that they signed up 1 million new Prime members in the 3rd week of December. I wonder how many of those people signed up for the free trial with the intention of cancelling before the end of the free month? I know that's e
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
Gold become desirable because it is an ideal metal to use for jewelry. That came first and its use as a currency came second. In that sense, it has been used in industry longer that it has been a currency.
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
> And so on, and so forth. The author makes a big point of arguing that they aren't financial instruments so much as they are real assets. There's some truth to this; if I own a bitcoin nobody is obligated to give me anything i
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
I was wondering the same thing. The number of employees is around 2300, according to Bloomberg. I think you could run Twitter with a development/engineering staff of 100. What are all of those other people doing? Sales?
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
I think it's a bad sign when you see a company as dramatically overvalued as Twitter is. The primary function of stock markets is capital allocation, i.e. directing capital to companies that can provides the greatest return. When you s
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
Economist Joseph Lawrence of Princeton University in 1929: “The consensus judgment of the millions whose valuations function on that admirable market, the Stock Exchange, is that stocks are not at present over-valued. Where is that group of
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
There was an interesting article on Seeking Alpha a few months ago comparing Wal-Mart with Amazon at the same stage of growth (i.e. comparable level of overall revenue and revenue growth). He compared Wal-Mart in 1990-92 and Amazon in 2010-
17.
by Rimpinths 13y ago
> They're thin in some places but huge in others. AWS, for example, has a 50% gross profit margin, and their gross margins on digital goods (mp3s, ebooks) are also high. How do you know this? I don't think they have ever releas
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post set this up and wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning article about it. It's a great article, "Pearls Before Breakfast": http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/a
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by Rimpinths 13y ago
It's an asset from the point of view of the bank or institution that made the loan. And they can transfer those assets from one investor to another. And the value of those assets can be based on unrealistic expectations about future de
20.
by Rimpinths 13y ago
It was a pretty big deal. I ran some queries against some intraday data of a proprietary market index (kind of a cross between the S&P 500 and Russell 2000) and it was the biggest one minute drop (at -0.56%) that I found within the past
21.
by Rimpinths 14y ago
If you're really interested in this topic, Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" covers this in detail. Great book.
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by Rimpinths 14y ago
BATS Exchange in Kansas City is hiring C++ programmers. Needless to say, your background would be ideal. http://bats.com/about/careers/
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by Rimpinths 14y ago
Speaking as a software developer at one of the exchanges, I thought these comments were accurate and insightful. A lot of people think that colocation is inherently unfair, but they don't realize what a huge improvement this is over the old
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by Rimpinths 16y ago
I thought what lrm242 said and what I said were pretty much the same thing. But there is no standard definition of 'latency', so it's hard to say what "they mean" unless they publish a definition on their website. But I know of at least thr
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by Rimpinths 16y ago
They are clustered together because it takes roughly the same amount of time to determine that an order can be matched (filled) or that it can't be matched (acknowledged, on the book.) Either way, it has to be processed by the matching engi
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by Rimpinths 16y ago
I'm a software developer at an exchange in the US. The LSE has not released details of how it is measuring "latency", but FWIW, we measure latency as the time it takes to submit an order and receive an order acknowledgment or fill, with bot
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by Rimpinths 16y ago
I've always really enjoyed reading your posts on HN. I saw that you were quoted in The Register with some identifying information, and I finally put 2 and 2 together and realized that you were the author of some of my favorite posts over at
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by Rimpinths 17y ago
One other aspect of HFT that was not mentioned in the article is that HFTers often seek arbitrage opportunities. For example, the value of many ETFs such as SPY (i.e. an ETF tracking the S&P 500) are derived from the value of underlying