the seduction

Wow first blog... first post... this is awkward. Ive been following high frequency trading tech for a while now. Its one of those things which grows and grows on you from a purely technical point of view like one of those mosquito bug zappers which hypnotically attract insects. Latency problems, throughput problems, hardware architecture, crazy ass server infrastructure, cycle counting, bit f00king and so on are all finally getting interesting. And my current excursion into entrepreneurship result is the obvious but from an tech point of view, depressing result. Entrepreneurship is about solving peoples problems NOT technical problems.

Which is why high freq/algo trading is interesting, as from outwards appearance its yourself or a small group going out into the blood bath that is the market to brawl with your foes computer systems where the only thing that matters is the PnL. no marketing, no sales, no clients, no support, no investors and not really a product either its all about is your tech faster and smarter than the competition. Its in stark contrast to entrepreneurship, which is about going out into the market to discover peoples problems, building solution to these peoples problem, getting people to use your solution and then getting people to pay. Not to mention cultivating a people network of relationships, building a team of people and so on.

Trading looks like finding a weakness in the market, build a strategy/algo to exploit it then ruthlessly execute for as long as possible. So as an introvert, hacker and tech centric person im being seduced by the notion trading is focused on tech, numbers and bits. Thus this blog is about testing the hypothesis to see where it all goes.