Caml trading

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61

by apr • 17 years ago

33 12 17 years ago

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tigerthink6• 17 years ago

I was confused when he mentioned the importance of code correctness. Wouldn't it be easy to write more software to monitor how your trading software is doing and intercede if it seems to be losing you a lot of money?

tumult4• 17 years ago

Did you really watch it? He explains that at the speed and volume with which they handle transactions, an error could cause them to disintegrate in a handful of milliseconds.

Besides – why write more code to check if your original code is correct, when you can just write correct code? And if you write software to check your software, then do you have to write software to check the checking software? Police police police police...

tigerthink6• 17 years ago

>He explains that at the speed and volume with which they handle transactions, an error could cause them to disintegrate in a handful of milliseconds.

Right. That's why you should have software monitoring things instead of a human.

>Besides – why write more code to check if your original code is correct, when you can just write correct code? And if you write software to check your software, then do you have to write software to check the checking software? Police police police police...

Same reason it makes sense to have proof checking software like Metamath. It's fairly easy to write software that has an 90% probability of being correct. It's maybe three times harder to write software that has a 99% probability of being correct, so it's cheaper to write 90% likely to be correct software and then another piece of 90% likely to be correct software that checks it. That's what my intuition says.

Anyway, I think monitoring software would be much easier to write than actual trading software.

if bank_account < 0.9 * prev_bank_account: stop_trading()

Caml trading

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