Hacker News Reader

Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

more of a pivot, China started cracking down heavily on quants in 2024

I'm curious about this. Two articles I've read all but said they basically failed as a quant and lost more than they gained. The wiki points out some losses, but some wins, so is unclear.

Have they actually pivoted, or are they just messing around to see what sticks?

Didn't they crack down mostly on HFT? I haven't heard of a huge crackdown on low/medium frequency quants, and LLM research has low crossover with high freq. quant stuff

almost all quant work is 'HFT'

This is wrong. There are plenty of quant strategies that aren't a race.

most quant money/employment is among market makers who are not holding for longer than a day and most trades probably complete within a few seconds.

regardless, high-flyer is an HFT firm

Trading within a few seconds is not really considered HFT, it's mid-freq nowadays. High frequency is in microseconds end to end nowadays.

High-Flyer says it took directional bets and held positions, which makes at least part of it not HFT.

Also, I doubt that most quant money is in market making nowadays. That was true at some point and that's true of HFT, but I doubt it is of quant trading in general anymore.

Besides, High Flyer certainly isn't a market maker, or they wouldn't be a hedge fund. You can't really be both, hence with Citadel and Citadel Securities (Market Maker) are so strictly divided.

Absolutely not. The large majority quant work is mid frequency, on the other of seconds to minutes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com