Geeks trump alpha males as algorithms dominate Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Geeks trump alpha males as algorithms dominate Wall Street

reuters.com

8 pointsr11t12 comments

I work for one of these firms. I think the article's creating a false dichotomy.

It's nothing like academia or a stereotypical think-tank. The environment is very aggressive, high-pressure, and results oriented. Nobody cares about your pedigree so long as your ideas work and make them money. Trading is one of the most purely competitive businesses in the world.

Most of the players are basically alpha male types who can do math and code. I actually think it's a great fit for people who are aggressive and entrepreneurial.

(And no, we're not front-running your orders or clubbing baby seals, despite the media's insistence otherwise.)

Accurate synopsis. Also, the work isn't very interesting from a technical perspective, although being surrounded by really smart people is nice.

Most quant jobs, unfortunately, require C++, due to legacy code. Haskell seems to be making in-roads, though.

Depends on what interests you. I think massive distributed systems processing huge amounts of data using exotic network technologies and super tight code are interesting, but it's not everyone's bag.

C++ is still used a lot because it's fast and allows you to efficiently communicate with the hardware and OS. I'll admit it's ugly, but it's a good choice for certain systems. On the pure analytics side, most quants seem to be moving to more modern and flexible languages, where prototyping ideas quickly is more important than latency.

Jane St Capital uses OCaml extensively (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2336889538700185341...).

I'm curious to see if Google's Go makes any inroads. It seems well-suited to building these types of systems and does away with some of C++'s baggage.

I'm in the business as well, and the thing that I really appreciate about it after reading HN for a few years is this: no customers. You don't have to worry about sales and marketing if you're in a prop shop that trades its own capital, you just write software that makes money in the market and that's all you need to worry about.

True, though what appeals to me more is the flatness of the organization and the degree to which everyone's involved. I literally sit next to a partner writing strategies. It's nice working with people who have skin in the game, so to speak.

I've had the same experience in other small organizations, even ones with customers. You learn a lot since there's less isolation. Big corporate work is hellish to me personally since you can't see the result of your effort and don't even have the information to make good decisions.

Best of luck out there, but not too much. :)

I'm always happy to hear that geeks are trumping suits, but if suits can convince geeks to give up on startups and instead spend their lives writing trading algorithms, even for a lot of money, have the geeks really won?

money?

Who says the firms are led by suits? Many of the founders of these firms are math or CS phds.

Most of the big high-frequency firms were founded by former commodities pit traders who knew their days were numbered and saw opportunity in the growth of electronic markets. They are not suits by any means, but not all are technical or math gurus, either.

A good example would be Dave Cummings, former KCBOT trader and founder of TradeBot (an automated trading firm) and BATS (an electronic stock exchange that's grown very rapidly over the past few years). He's actually moved into venture capital recently (http://www.tradebotventures.com/).

ETA: Though to be fair he does have an engineering background. Some others I can think of (e.g., guys who founded GETCO) don't.

Fair enough. I suppose the suits might not have had anything to do with this.

But I still feel a twinge of regret when I read these articles. I'm skeptical about the value of these activities. I don't think they contribute much to the general wealth (the contributions may even be negative) and I definitely share in the resentment many people feel these days toward the banking industry.

A lot of folks try to equate this with a resentment of wealth or capitalism, but I think that's incorrect. Americans still greatly admire people who become wealthy, and generally don't view the economy as a zero sum game. For instance, nobody (almost) resents the millionaires and billionaires at google. While I'm not sure if your average American has thought it through this carefully, I think it comes down to the perception that startups create wealth, whereas wall street takes wealth.

That's too simplistic, I know. But I don't think it's entirely incorrect, either.

I guess I'm just a little sorry to see geeks displaying the behavior I always associated with suits - involving themselves in activities of dubious economic value for the sole purpose of enriching themselves. Especially when geeks have so many ways of becoming wealthy that also add tremendously to the general wealth.

This was posted here yesterday...

Different source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=973490

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