AllanHoustonSt

That’s pretty metal.

There is trading activity in the milliseconds-seconds horizon as well. I'm sure all the big HFT players participate plenty. These just wouldn't be considered MM strategies.

Your original question was why MMs have to operate at HFT horizons. MMs by definition are liquidity providers (which means high availability and high volume at competitive prices). In some cases (DMMs) they're legally obligated to do so at some well defined baseline. And in that specific context HFT speeds are required.

I guess I would say, it depends?

Existing profitable MMs aren't all equally fast. So the slower ones that trade on the same exchanges or even the same indices have to be profitably trading at a wider spread.

HFT isn't a concrete term so I guess technically there's no hard line to draw for how fast your roundtrip times have to be to be profitable. But if you are trading wide enough where you think latency isn't a factor, aren't you really just predicting where you think the book will go "far" ahead in the future? MM is inherently a reactionary business (with some effort put into anticipating the price moving against you in the very very short term).

Traders (be it hedge funds, props, retail, anyone) will only "take your action" if you price competitively. You'll never get your orders filled. The open bid and ask as per whatever the exchange quotes are really the only prices that matter when it comes to what actually gets executed.

Also even if you do quote wider, to effectively capture the spread, your buy on one side and your sell on the other side still have to basically occur simultaneously which is where the demand for latency comes in so you really can't escape it.

That said there are ways to still be profitable even if you know you're not the fastest gun in the west across the most exchanges. Without going into too many details you'd have to selectively choose where/what you trade. Which is not trivial at all of course.

The industry as a whole provides net value to the market by via higher liquidity and tighter spreads.

The arms race is a necessity due to rising competition. HFTs cannibalize each other every year. People on the outside seem to think being in HFT inherently means you’re printing money but they don’t acknowledge how tough the business actually is. Many firms have either collapsed or have been bought out over the past decade.

Market makers specifically (who inherently have to operate in HFT time horizons) don't even compete with low-mid frequency hedge funds and props. They don't compete with retail investors. They strictly compete against other MMs to capture the spread.

You’d be surprised at how many traders and QRs in HFT (or at least in OMM) often reach for Excel. Granted this is way more common among older people in the industry. And as a technologist OP wouldn’t have to worry about writing or maintaining Excel scripts :p

I continually find myself amazed with what people can do with Excel.

Which popular H1B source countries teach COBOL? I feel like the advent of cheap offshore programming came well after the decline of COBOL. Though my sense of history can very well be off.

Live tells aren’t taken that seriously or considered a significant factor outside of laymen.

That said I do think the dynamics of poker change more than most other board/card/table games when going from live to online or vice versa, with my extremely limited understanding of chess, go, and Magic.

I remember seeing murmurings of this on reddit. Cool to see it’s a paper now, thanks for sharing.

I personally wouldn’t mind seeing the language go the “editions” route a la Rust.

Unfortunately I agree with you Jane Street's tech blog and published lecture series are great and probably the best I know of. They make for great advertising to boot. Lecture series like Jane Street's are common in larger trading firms (more than 100-150 headcount) but I haven't seen one of JS' caliber yet.

If you welcome general corporate blogs, I think Google AI's technical blog is quite good. Their frequent publications on distributed computing strike a good balance of academic and practical ideas:

https://ai.googleblog.com

Cloudflare also has one of my favorite more engineering focused blogs.

As others have mentioned, they have ways of writing OCaml specifically to not trigger the GC or perform any excessive allocations. Helps when you have your own version of the compiler and a branch of the language itself.

This is talked about with an example in this talk around 18m30s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BysBMdx9w6k

Also as someone else mentioned, Jane Street doesn't try regularly competing (to my knowledge as someone in the industry) at trading horizons that demand lowest the lowest possible latency.

I feel like self checkout kiosks already solve this. Commodotized Amazon Go tech is a minute improvement in convenience compared to traditional cashier -> self checkout.

Would it be possible to do this without changing how name mangling works?

Neat, TIL.

In the US my only exposure to Mercari have been low budget Youtube ads that make it look like a side project from a high schooler. I guess that's marketing at work (or not at work).

Cryptography was both my favorite topic in school and the one that cemented my realization in that I wasn't good enough to do math for a living.

Won't the winner be the one who just takes AlphaGo's recommended move every time without changing anything?

That's only true if AlphaGo never makes a mistake or if AlphaGo will 100% always make the better or equal decision than a human + computer at any given state of the board. I know the former certainly isn't true and I assume the latter isn't true either, but I don't know enough about Go to say for sure.

This is the current state of online poker. I enjoy it in the spirit of the game as a fan but it's definitely made earning potential and barrier of entry much higher. Poker stands on a net negative economy so the game is converging to a point of being unbeatable unfortunately.

I don't think Google has it in them. Something about their vertical integration, supply chain management, cross team coordination, etc etc. They just consistently put out phones that are subpar in the daily usability and quality control fronts. So I'm kinda glad they go for these exotic features. They know they have to stand out somehow.

I still think having a network of drivers all around you and being able to track the status of your ride both pre-arrival and during the ride itself makes rideshare a better product. Depending where you are those dispatched drivers can take a while to get to you.

Of course you can just have a bunch of black car services in your phonebook that are dispersed around the city but.. at that point why not just use rideshare?

Also good luck getting reasonable (or any) cab service outside of Manhattan and NW Brooklyn. It was even worse pre rideshare days. Those are the areas that would need something like rideshare more since they're both less dense with less expansive public transit.

I don't know if private transport is ultimately unsustainable. That's something people much smarter than me will have to figure out how to measure. But I do know rideshare is objectively a better product for consumers across the board than the services it replaced.

I think DPDK does some user-level trickery to achieve per-core caching through DMA, do you happen to know how they go about it?

I thought clicking around different combinations of buttons to discover what would happen was part of the fun. I kept trying to kill it to no avail.

Is the overwhelming debit spending vs credit spending an emotionally charged and risk averse rationale decision by the general populace or just unfortunate financial illiteracy?

Unfortunately, at least in the Northeast Corridor, almost no one does this.

If I had to guess, Goldman Sachs

People bet on chess as well, I have old colleagues who do it actively. That’d fall under this VC’s purview as well.

I have hold no stigma against gambling, I used to gamble professionally. I just think it’s important to acknowledge what is and isn’t gambling and to acknowledge society and legislation generally have a stigma against it.

And I would imagine the sports gambling industry would be covered by this C VC as well if there’s money in it.

It's the equivalent of sports gambling.