A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders with a Ph.D
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Wall Street has been hiring physics & math graduates for a good while now, but typically as quants, not traders. Those were (are?) hugely different positions, in terms of responsibility and dollars realized.
Not my area, so I may just be missing something too. But when I had acquaintances going into this sort of things, they weren't getting anywhere near a trading desk. At least, not for a while.
If you're just a "cog in the machine" doing research or writing software for a trader, and he ends up sucking, the firm will probably shuffle you around to work under someone else. You have generally useful technical skills, cost less than the trader, and recruiting good technical people is expensive.
If you're a supposedly brilliant trader but cost the firm money taking stupid risk or fail to make any profit to justify your inflated salary and bonus, there's not really much they can do with you.
Smart people have been hired as quantitative traders for decades, this really is nothing new.
It's never been a market maker's job to invest in companies.
If it is just about agnostic profit over assisting business expansion and creation than Wall Street is really is a casino than a market.
I would never knowingly invest in a tobacco company or an arms maker. (I am long the S&P 500) Some might feel okay with it since they are smokers and appreciate a strong defense but who is okay with a computer crashing a market becasue it was profitable?
>Idealist me thinks that Wall Street should invest in those companies they believe in and wish to assist in achieving their business goals.
It seems that the general trend is against banks taking proprietary positions. I guess my knee-jerk response is that I agree with that trend as I don't want my deposits used to fund someone's investment thesis. If I did, I would put my money in a mutual fund or other investment vehicle rather than a bank. At the same time, it's certainly not against the law for banks to make longer term investments.
>but who is okay with a computer crashing a market becasue it was profitable
I am certainly no fan of banks, but this does not seem like an accurate representation of their role in the markets.
Isn't that what the buy-side is for?
- Providing access to capital and dealmaking facilities for companies looking to grow or change ownership. That's IPOs, debt issues, mergers & acquisitions, spinoffs, corporate restructuring. Banks organize those deals and shop them around, acting as advisers.
- Facilitating trading of securitized instruments (public stocks, bonds, derivatives) by making markets or otherwise connecting buyers and sellers to exchanges or other counterparties. These buyers and sellers are the funds actually investing in individual companies and retail brokers servicing individual investors. The bank is neutral in its view of the issuers of the securities being traded, it just wants to see trading happen. (Sometimes this involves creating a specific instrument for one client and selling offsetting instruments to others, but again the intent is that the bank is not taking a position in that client.)
- Providing banking services to corporate clients. Loaning them money, helping them manage exposure to foreign currencies, and so on. The kind of stuff any retail bank does for its individual clients, but scaled up.
> Idealist me thinks that Wall Street should invest in those companies they believe in and wish to assist in achieving their business goals.
Your idealist premise is also a bit frightening if you think about it further: you're suggesting that an industry with a purely facilitatory role - i.e. offering access to public markets - should use some sort of qualitative moral judgement on who it should provide services to. That's a dark path.
Fortunately your industry does exist: it's called the buy side, and there are fund managers out there who will happily take your money, pool it with others, and invest according to a thesis they are legally obliged to share with you and stick to.
Well, no, anytime the company is selling shares you can invest in the company rather than the secondary market. The IPO is obviously the first such event, but it isn't necessarily the only such event.
Personally, I believe that is incorrect. The amount of market activity related to getting capital to companies is dwarfed by other activity. As data points:
- Commodities markets don't allocate capital to companies (or farmers or whatever) at all.
- Most new stock sales (IPO or otherwise) happen outside of the public markets first, and are allocated to a minority of the market participants.
I think a much better way to think of the markets is as primarily about pricing risk. That this risk assessment function happens to provide a good way to allocate capital to companies is a by product.
> This secondary market is the other function of the market (what you just called investing in the flow of money in and out of a position). Both are necessary.
I clearly addressed that markets have more than one function.
I'm not convinced that the capital allocation component of the markets is even as you say "necessary". You could easily envision the markets chugging along fine without allowing any direct sale of equity to the markets. That is some intermediary would be required to buy the equity from the company as it became available and in turn could then sell that equity into the markets. We are almost to that point already.
You are forgetting about dividends.
Any sell-side investment bank still has clear lines between traders and quants. In fact, while they blurred more pre-2007 I'd argue they've become more clearly defined.
Source: work at a prominent investment bank.
I still always joked about the idea of myself and a friend becoming traders and trading opposite strategies, then splitting the bonus one of us is bound to get. Obviously we'd need to obfuscate that the expectations on our ambitious strategies would be roughly mirror images of each other -- one would get fired, the other may get a few million.
The problem is, that most strategies are zero, on average. You win some, lose some with your trades, but what eats your capital is the trading costs. Then even trading the opposite trade would still diminish your capital.
I think back to an earlier HN discussion [1] on the article "The Rent Seeking is Too Damn High" [2] - when my father worked at a bank he said it wasn't uncommon for your market salesman from the street to get picked up as a trader, indeed my friends mother went from secretary to trader. She was given a chance because her boss felt like she had a spark about her.
It's fun to look back on the past with rosy eyes thinking "those days were better" but truly how can we hope for meritocratic (in the true sense of the word!) social mobility if you need 0.5 million USD in school fees to get a job as a trader?
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11054527 or possibly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11041340 (two days earlier, way fewer comments)
Optiver even sponsored the mathematic, physics and cs study association for students in Leiden for the longest time. Trying to win over students before they graduated.
https://www.deleidscheflesch.nl/p/optiver
Competitors did this too. Really nothing new here.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-17/knight-cap...
Imagine this for a daily routine: 1) oh shit this is awesome: x times $1000000 means i'm going to be so fucking rich! 2) run code live on the XYZ market, trying not to shit bricks 3) hang-on i found a bug in my analysis/data-preprocessing/ML pipeline and i'm not going to be rich. 4) spend hours (or days) fixing bug & re-running analysis 5) go back to 1).
After a few months of this one gets seriously fragged.
How people can claim the market allocates money correctly I do not know, it doesn't seem possible with the rigging and illegal activity that's been going on.
I was doing research on environmental effects on organisms and their offspring with huge implications in development. Now I am using my talents to get more clicks for a website.
In this case, they serve as a very efficient market to connect people with the goods and services they want/need which only helps the greater economy and benefits everyone.
I actually have a pet conspiracy theory that the articles about HFT are the result of lobbying on the part of banks. When I worked at a bank, I did see articles that were heavily influenced by employees of the bank. This influence was never nefarious, but I can see how a traditional trader's biases may have lead to some of these HFT articles.
I rarely see articles about the evils of internalization, something that I strongly believe brings great harm to the markets. At the same time, I often see articles about how HFT takes advantage of the market and brings little benefit when I've made internal measurements that show just the opposite.
Of course none of the above is any sort of advice, and it's probably appropriate for me to note that I've worked as trader at a bank and currently work as a trader at an HFT firm.
How?
These aren't the quants from the 90s that were Physics PhDs applying the latest and greatest in differential equations and whatnot. These are programmers who know how to make the complier do more work for them so they achieve results faster.
To be honest this is the same argument people make for Haskell and I'm only assuming the argument applies to OCaml equally well.
This article is missing something very important, the fact that coding doesn't mean you're going to trade better.
A coder doesn't know how to trade right off the bat, they'll only know how to code in a specific trading rubric (most trading algos aren't even good unless we're talking HFT) that has been told to them from someone that already knows how to trade successfully.
Anyone that's a real trader and has managed clients money will instantly be able to tell you that this is articles title is misleading.
MARCY DAWSON: I admit we've been too aggressive. But all I ask is that you give me five minutes. As a token, accept this.
MAX: I don't want your money
MARCY DAWSON: The suitcase isn't filled with dollars, or gold, or diamonds. Just silicon. A Ming Mecca chip.
MAX: Ming Mecca? They're not even de-classified yet.
MARCY DAWSON: You're right, they're not. But Lancet-Percy has many friends. Beautiful, isn't it? Do you know how rare these are?
MAX: What do you...?
MARCY DAWSON: Mr Cohen?
MAX RUNS DOWN INTO A SUBWAY
(taken from π screenplay by Darren Aronofsky)
One of my favorite movies.
On a side note: omg janestreet is such my dream job. Writing functional code, working on immensely interesting problems (what is the market distribution?) and being paid for it.
There's the economic question of why the market rewards them so well (not that, in the real world, the reward is usually proportional to the value, but it's something to think about). Is it essentially the equivalent of rent-seeking - that is, they get their hands on the resource first and then sell it to others? Or perhaps it's simply the free market, but working on a timescale of microseconds, where efficieny does't really benefit a society of humans that live on timescales orders of magnitude larger.
Finally, there's the concentration of wealth that results from these activities, which is a serious concern.
(I'm not saying everything everyone does must contribute to society, or that I'm a saint who lives on nuts and berries and tends to lepers, but it's a consideration.)
A certain number of "speculators" are needed to provide liquidity to capital markets. It's unclear what that number is, but it is most likely nowhere near the level we currently see.
In essence, it is gambling. These funds are supported on an ongoing basis by asset management fees. This provides a nice living for the fund managers and employees. They are structured so that the players experience all upside and no downside. If they lose millions of dollars it's not like the employees and managers are responsible for making it up (although sometimes there are clawback provisions, but not nearly as often as you would want). But if they make millions they take a cut of their gains.
This most likely leads to unnecessary risk-taking. (unnecessary in the sense that there's no net economic benefit from it).
So if this is largely a zero-sum game, who are the losers and why don't they do anything about it? Good question. Most directly it is the institutions and wealthy individuals who invest with hedge funds.
These institutions/individuals do it because as a species we have a flawed reasoning capacity and overestimate our ability to exercise good judgment.
To be fair, that describes many, many jobs. Consider that a backup offensive lineman for your local NFL team probably makes more money than the General in charge of US forces in the Mideast.
Your argument 'I produce something of value to society' means 'I am fairly compensated' is a very odd one.
I think this is wrong, though, at least when the question is value to society. Their compensation is very good evidence that they are doing something of value to someone, but that may be counterbalanced by negative consequences for other people.
For instance, suppose I happen to be a very skilled thief, and some acquisitive billionaire pays me to steal great artworks from museums so that he can hang them in his living room. This is a very valuable service for the billionaire, because the museums probably wouldn't sell them to him at all, and if they did they'd be incredibly expensive; so paying me $1M for each theft is a big win for him. And he really, really loves art, and loves knowing that he owns precious things* even more, and he has money to burn, so getting those artworks is easily worth the $1M/item to him.
In this scenario, I am providing plenty of value (as measured in dollars) to my employer, and my compensation reflects that. But am I doing something of value to society? Hell, no. Perhaps our hypothetical billionaire gets more satisfaction from looking at the Mona Lisa than most of those schlubs at the Louvre, but surely nowhere near enough more to make it better for it to hang in his house than in the museum.
Isn't this the same argument car vendors use to justify why car sales shouldn't come straight from the manufacturer?
Basically, a lot of people's careers are based on this and if you deprecate that business, they'll be out of luck. But that's the only reason, that too many people have become too reliant on a niche that shouldn't exist in the first place.
The evidence of economic value is the fact that these activities are so lucrative. If they weren't producing a lot of value somehow, be it directly or indirectly, they wouldn't receive such high compensation in the market. Economic value is essentially a measure of what people are willing to pay for things (revealed preference), under the assumption that people paying for something, absent any cooercion or market distortion, means they value it.
Even in theory, many conditions are required for free markets to function efficiently. Regardless, we don't live in a free market, and many other factors determine income.
This argument doesn't work.
Economic value isn't necessarily "valuable for society", it's "valued by people as measured by some particular metric based on the preferences expressed in their spending behaviour". Gambling for instance is something that could be said to have little value to society, but has economic value in the sense that gamblers obviously get some satisfaction out of it or else they wouldn't put so much money into it.
Pyramid schemes generally involve fraud, and when someone is defrauded into buying something economics doesn't consider that purchase an expression of their preferences. If it didn't involve fraud and people knew it was a pyramid scheme yet still invested in it, then they'd have to perceive some value in investing else why would they do it?
Finance provides some liquidity to the market, sure, but is largely parasitic. Just like anyone else with a get rich quick scheme, really.
Suppose for a moment the value traders create is real. Like the trader making $X a year also creates $X of value (like a farmer that works hard/smart to plant 10 times the number of potatoes as his neighbor). How would that make you feel? Would we accept that that was even possible?
It's not new that Wall Street is hiring Ph.D scientists and mathematicians (that's been happening since the 80s) but what's changing is the kind of role they are getting hired for.
From the 1980s up until 2005 or perhaps even later, most Ph.Ds were hired in "quant" roles, that is, to build mathematical models that could price and manage the risk of derivatives. They were generally not in trading roles.
More recently (i.e. in the last decade) it's common to hire Ph.Ds as traders - that is, to write algorithms that are used to make trading decisions. This requires a rather different set of skills - instead of being skilled in stochastic calculus, partial differential equations and numerical methods, the quant trader is skilled in statistics, data analysis, optimisation and machine learning.
It's true that Wall Street has Ph.Ds hired to build trading models for many years (e.g. Renaissance) but the change is that this is no longer an esoteric fringe pursuit. It is seen as standard that trading desks at investment banks will have a large number of quant traders. Large European investment banks have heads of trading who are quants. Quantitative hedge funds are no longer mysterious and exciting - many of them use well understood models that have been widely replicated across the industry.
To be honest, I am surprised that it has taken this long. Finance is so obviously suited to these kinds of quantitative methods that only an aggressive rearguard action by voice traders has been able to keep them at bay. The question is no longer whether quantitative traders and their algorithms will largely replace voice traders, but how long the voice traders will manage to hold out.
Jane Street is an interesting special case. From my (somewhat limited) interactions with them, they are neither wholly voice traders nor wholly algorithmic. Instead, their researchers and traders build algorithmic trading systems which can be "driven "by humans. For example, the system will continually calculate a set of useful metrics that a human trader uses to make a final buy/sell decision, and trade is then immediately executed by high frequency execution algorithms. Or the human trader decides to make a complicated spread bet (e.g. long an ETF vs. a cost-optimized basket of the underlying stocks) and the algorithm goes out to execute the basket as effectively as possible.
I think there's an interesting parallel to "Centaur chess" [0] where the combination of a computer and a human is much more powerful than either of them acting alone.
Although I'm not a quant and do not even directly work in the finance industry, my experience working as part of a machine learning outfit definitely corroborates this. Data Science may be a hard term to truly define (it's quite broad, particularly when you start applying it in the real world) -- but the general skill set is definitely seeping into computer software/engineering roles. I'm not sure how it will go in the future (there are many viewpoints on this) but I wouldn't be surprised for this trend to continue.
What's the point of doing engineering anywhere if you don't get paid as much as these guys to shift money around?
“As a trader, if you do well, you will retire before you turn 30,” said one employee on an industry message board.
That is basically 100% unattributed, unconfirmed bullshit.
Getting to that level is like making partner in a law firm. You have to do much better than "well" and anyone who gets there would be a fool to retire and likely wouldn't want to anyway due to the personality traits/defects required to get there in the first place.
The thing is, what you mean by "if you do well". In the cases I observed, for every trader that did well for themselves there were 49 that did not.
> For example, Jane Street, which is privately held, has increased its shareholder’s equity, or net worth, to more than $1 billion today from $228 million in 2007.
Is this supposed to be an impressive stat? ZocDoc has become about $2 billion company in basically the same time frame, which seems more impressive given that ZocDoc didn't start from that $228M handicap. My perception is that it's also much more expensive to run a company like Jane Street.
Granted, it's probably significantly smaller than the $2B figure you cited.
1. Get a physics PhD with
2. Some experience in computer modeling
3. Get hired by Wall Street
Even with the downturn in '08, I've seen no indication he was wrong.
Yes there is nothing new, in that you physically cannot write the words "Jane Street Capital" without subsequently writing the the word "OCaml". But seriously, an OCaml reference in the New York Times. Someone must be celebrating.
Peter Thiel said MBAs flocking to certain tech as warning signs of a peak, likewise wall streets have had PHDs flocking as a measure of it's peak.
I fear that with a double whammy of low oil prices and low commodity prices, it will spark a long period of economic stagnation in the near future, as more jobs disappear in increasing numbers and social benefit falls and governments around the world struggle to monetize their aging populations.
The countries with young and increasing birth rate will feel the impact the worst, and we are already seeing such demographic in Europe packing up their bags and joining jihadi movements.
So if commodity prices go up, it's bad because Europe can't afford those commodities. But then if they go down it's also but because...?
Heck, it's not a double whammy, it's good news for most countries in the world. A different story might be why are these commodities going down (because China's demand has been drying up), and that might actually be bad news, but it's another argument.
Cornell physics PhDs: 3
Harvard physics PhDs: 2
Princeton physics PhDs: 2
Univ of Penn physics PhD: 1
Other physics PhDs: 2
Cornell applied math PhD: 1
Other applied math PhD: 1
Cornell mechanical engineering PhD: 1
Univ of Chicago finance PhD: 1
So, if by "dropout" you mean that they didn't complete their PhDs, then no, that's wrong. If by "dropout" you mean people leaving physics, then yes, it's very common (especially for theorists -- all physicists on the list above where theorists except maybe one or two).
* Very generally, the Times focuses more on investigative journalism and non-business news; the WSJ's priority is business news. But they both cover plenty in all fields.
* The Times is generally a little more prominent, the leading newspaper (and news source) in the world and the "Newspaper of Record"[1] for the U.S., but I'm not sure how that reputation benefits you, the reader.
* The Times' arts coverage is unquestionably the best and most sophisticated of any newspaper, if that matters to you, from film to theater to music to exhibitions to other 'fine' arts. However, it is somewhat New York-centric (it is the New York Times, after all, and NY is the center of the U.S. and global art world).
* Editorial: Even the best newspapers' standards of accuracy on their editorial pages are far below those of their journalism; they often are happy to print outright lies and propaganda either to push a political issue or because it's influential. IIRC, maybe a decade ago the Times decided they would raise the standards somewhat on their editorial page. Regardless, I find the Times publishes less outright bullsh-t; they have a politically diverse roster of columnists but the unsigned editorials are definitely liberal. The WSJ regularly pushes things like climate denial and other bizarre ideas (that serve the conservative, wealthy busiess elite) such as this one:[2] Personally, I don't read any editorials in any paper - they are so regularly ignorant of or lying about the facts and full of propaganda (that word again) that I never know if I'm becoming more misinformed by reading them.
* Other options: Also, I'd consider the Financial Times, the leading international competitor to the WSJ, which I think is just as good as the other two and provides a more diverse perspective coming from the UK. Certainly there is more overlap in coverage between the NYT and WSJ than between either and the FT - check out their site and you'll see many important stories you'd oterwise miss. The Washington Post also is excellent. I can't think of another source of serious news, in English, in the class of those four.
* IMHO: The WSJ is owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch), the same company that owns Fox News. Their demonstrated willingness to lie and push propaganda at Fox News, as well as openly use it to control the political process, makes me doubt that the same owners would have more integrity at WSJ. Their editorial page confirms my doubts to a degree. I don't trust it, though many others do. I don't completely trust the NY Times either, of course, but much more than their Manhatten neighbor.
I hope that helps.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_of_record - don't believe some Wikipedia editor's attempt to equate the LA Times and Washington Post with the Times. If any challenges its position, it's the WSJ.
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/wsj-defends-kristal... - It describes and links to the original, which is behind a paywall.
Interesting. I would disagree, or at least I think being the "best online newspaper" is sort of like being the best WAP web browser. I think many bloggers do better.
Note that we call it an 'online newspaper' - often you can instantly identify news websites are made by former newspapers as opposed to other news sources, as if the UI of their website should depend on the archaic medium they once used.
As a user, I don't find the innovations very useful and the design functions poorly. For example:
1) Most of their content is hard to discover; the front page must have 100 links to stories, some old and some new, and much more is buried elsewhere - if I wanted to see every story of interest to me, I'm not sure if or how I could do that starting from the home page. I also read it via RSS and it's a whole different news source, with far more coverage. People reading on the web miss a lot.
2) Updates to news stories: If a story has been updated, how do you know? You have to look around the home page for the words 'updated xx:yy' - not really a great method of notification. And if I click the updated story there is no way find out what's changed without reading the whole story again, looking for things that don't seem familiar.
3) Their inability to integrate multimedia in story-telling: A movie review never says, 'watch the clip below; see how the colors ...' <video> 'also note how the actors ...'. They have images and video, but they are decorations stapled onto the real story in text and not an integral part of it - or even a more dramatic example, the videos with hard news are completely segregated from the text story. They still are a newspaper, stuck in the limitations of the old medium where text was the only realistic option, with a few images added on.
Note that bloggers handle many of these issues efficiently. The NYT is still a newspaper on the web.
It is all about the shift to algorithmic trading, of which HFT is only a small sub-category.
Past the high infrastructural barrier to entry, and assuming they can stay ahead of the competition, the consistency of returns does seem lucrative, but the actual magnitudes of the opportunities are hard-limited by the nature of the time scales. You can't move any significant amount of capital in milliseconds and expect to profit. Compared to the average hedge fund, they are playing with pennies.
You are right that the actual execution algorithms aren't doing super complex analysis in real-time. Usually that is done offline through simulation to generate rule sets, decision trees or factor weightings. That work is definitely quantitative. Aside from pure arbitrage, most HFT strategies have a statistical edge, not a mechanical one.
> To "flip the spread" you need to predict where the market will go after your order gets elected.
Lets talk abstractly for a moment, that sentence is exactly wrong. The whole point of flipping the spread is that you can immediately sell what you just bought and make the spread risk free. That's what market making is, providing liquidity for the spread as profit. Now, pragmatically, of course the market doesn't sit still for long and the price may change between your buy and sell so of course it's good to predict the market direction to reduce the risk of being on the wrong side of a move. But HFT is trading at the microsecond scale, prices aren't moving much at that scale in that short a period of time and you only need to know where the market is going for say the next second to be in an out of a slew of trades.
> The market is pretty efficient.
Agreed.
> The average limit order loses the spread and rebates after execution.
I don't believe that. That would mean that slippage exceeds the spread and more on most orders and unless you're trading a very illiquid market there's no way that can be true unless you're trading very large, large enough to move the market alone.
> You are right that the actual execution algorithms aren't doing super complex analysis in real-time.
That's my main point.
> Usually that is done offline through simulation to generate rule sets, decision trees or factor weightings. That work is definitely quantitative.
I agree with that as well, but that's not HFT trading, that's market analysis and mostly I believe, though I admit I could be totally wrong here, that analysis is mostly used for slower algorithmic trading, not HFT. In HFT, it's better to be faster than smarter, especially with the sub-penny rule imposed by Dodd-Frank.
FWIW, every successful HFT trader I know does this type of "market analysis" driven trading backed by very fast execution. Speed alone is no longer an edge in most markets. Most are holding risk for more than microseconds or single seconds. Trade direction is auto-correlated in short timescales so even being front of the line you are unlikely to buy and sell to earn the spread so quickly.
> In a competitive equilibrium, this has to be the case.
I don't agree, the spread exists for a reason, it is quite literally the minimum cost of doing business for selling liquidity. If selling liquidity were not profitable, no one would do it.
> If the average limit order lost less than the spread and rebate, it would be profitable to mechanically copy every limit order with an infinitesimally small limit order placed right behind it.
That doesn't follow. You have no idea how much liquidity is sitting at that price so even posting at the same price wouldn't guarantee execution let alone posting behind it. Limit orders are profitable because they are inherently offering a service that the market is willing to pay for, liquidity, that's it.
> If the average limit order lost more, it would be profitable to copy every marketable order trading to remove any residual liquidity on the book at that price.
If the average limit order lost, it'd be called a market order because market orders lose the spread and limit orders make the spread, that's how it works. That is the equilibrium, market orders buy liquidity from limit orders for the price of the spread.
> Of course HFTs limit orders perform better than average or they'd be out of business (and many do go out of business).
Yes, exactly, and they perform better due to latency putting them first in the queue, that's rather the whole point of HFT, being first in line.
> Speed alone is no longer an edge in most markets.
Incorrect, speed is always an edge for the fastest trader; it's simply no longer easy to compete on speed for most firms. Dodd Frank has devastated HFT with the sub-penny rule making latency even more important and driving most out of business.
> Most are holding risk for more than microseconds or single seconds.
Yes, because they can't be the fastest, they have to start speculating a bit. This is because the hay day of HFT is over; they're being forced into speculation by the inability to compete on price due to the sub-penny rule and the inability to compete on speed due to the massive costs of doing so. But once you start speculating for longer than a few seconds, you're no longer a HFT trader, you're just an algorithmic trader. HFT is market making, if you're speculating on direction and holding for expected moves, you're not a HFT, you're an algo trader.
nytimes... why u so noob?