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Comment by franze | Hacker News Reader

>How can a person excel at the technologies required by these firms from my fintech experience with the financial departments there ... excel in Excel. it's a whole programming-parallel-world

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You’d see that mainly in over the counter and manual trading desks. So in the front office of a bank or corporation hedging commodities or interest rates for examples.

I think OP is asking about programming skills implying automated, systematic trading and algorithmic execution on exchange traded products.

Couldn't agree more, I have met people doing entire risk modelling in excel. It's a pretty powerful tool but nowadays everyone in financial world in emphasizing on the importance Python and Pandas. Even Non Technical people in financial industries are encouraged to learn Python for instance departments like Audit and etc

For HFT? Absolutely not. For trading? The original poster needs to clarify what they mean by "trading" as this is probably still the case for most tech-driven prop trading firms.

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

Excel is a very effective tool for many things but suggesting that it would be useful to spend time learning Excel to prepare for HFT is really bad advice.

Yup mostly tech driven trading shops use technology that’s why they have competitive edge compared to banks

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