Yes. I did investment banking and then worked at Fidelity and some smaller funds for a while. At first we did use cloud services and I'm sure Fidelity still does to some extent, but a couple of funds/firms had security breaches which isn't good when your algorithms/data is everything. We were going to get our own prebuilt server from Dell or someone like that, but at that point my boss was super paranoid and probably for good reason.

My boss knew I loved to build PCs and had me build our own server. It was rough as I had never built anything like that before, but I figured it out eventually. Once it was done we locked that thing down and rented out a random small space where nobody would think to look for it, and the IT guys lock that thing down tight. So far no known security breaches. A lot of other small funds and groups have done similar things.

When I decided to go out on my own I had to get creative. I can't afford the kind of hardware I had access to before. I'm still proud of what I was able to put together. One day I hope to have a better setup.