when milliseconds mean millions
Most trading firms are past the whole "beat the other guys to buy". Established large investment firms already have all that on lockdown in terms of infrastructure and influence to the extent where they basically just run the stock market at this point (i.e Tesla posts horrible quarter numbers, but stock goes up).
Most of the smaller firms basically try to figure out the patterns of the larger firms and capitalize on that. The timescales have shifted quite a bit.
In some cases the order leaving the card starts to emerge before the packet containing the market data event that they're responding to has even finished arriving.
Waiting for a full microsecond for the packet to arrive before responding means you're already too slow
The speed game is essentially over
Do you mean that because it involves a lot of hardware design now? The days of being able to offer around the inside in C++ on a regulated securities exchange are over, but there's still C++ driving the thing, that 20ns "tick to trade" or however it's being measured in some instance is still pretty basic response stuff, light speed is still a thing. There's a C++ program upstairs running the show, and it's trying to do it's job in under a mike for sure.
The OG talk on this is Carl Cook's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH1Tta7purM
But there are more recent talks (Optiver is especially transparent about it but other people talk about it too): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX2nF1fW7kI, that's David Gross at CppCon last year, it can't have changed that much since last year.
No matter how fast you process the data, the ping difference of 1ms is going to be an advantage that you can never beat.
There is a reason why firms like HRT trade mostly in derivatives and futures.
There are many more games to play than delta one takeout and the solutions certainly don’t fit on one or a handful of FPGA’s.
This is a non sequitur from who’s winning the HFT game
if you are someone like HRT I presume the bulk of their money comes at very short holding periods so you have e.g. fast signals that work short term and then mid frequency alpha signals that spit out a forecast over a few timeframes i.e. it might not be that they buy (aggressively) really quickly but rather than someone sells to them and then they hold onto the position for longer than they would if they have no opinions.
Similarly this shapes where you post your orders e.g. if you really want it then you want to be top of the book
Sometimes it will be worth the tradeoff to put that person and a programmer together to code up a solution in another language. Sometimes it will be worth it to have the non-programmer write it in Python and then do Herculean things in the background to make it fast enough.
Nim exists, Crystal exists
But it also wouldn't surprise me if a lot of shops land on python because that's what their hiring pool knows.
Though the encoder runs 64/66bits at a time, so you really get around 8B every 7ns or so.
This article from a16z explains the mechanics of reordering transactions for profit (MEV): https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/mev-explained/