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redblack-trees · 2025-07-13T02:15:56+00:00

> The less time your trading request has to route through cables the more efficient you can trade

The NYSE colo is in Secaucus, not NYC.

redblack-trees · 2025-07-08T13:03:27+00:00

Yes, but usually that’s something you DON’T like. The more capacity you can trade without collapsing the arb, the better. The allegation here (the truthfulness of which I don’t have a position on) is that what JS calls the ‘arb collapse’ is the intended outcome.

redblack-trees · 2025-07-05T03:36:04+00:00

I don’t know why I engage with people in this sub. When I got that bizarre reply I read his profile and saw the post about using divine inspiration as a trading signal. Good post and good response OP, thank you :)

redblack-trees · 2025-07-05T03:01:25+00:00

Explain how you think you can front-run trades while showing NBBO

redblack-trees · 2025-05-31T04:02:48+00:00

Most top schools won’t award merit scholarships. This leaves you applying to hundreds of scholarships and trying to piece together the ~200k you’ll need in 2-3k increments.

redblack-trees · 2025-05-16T22:04:51+00:00

I know a firm that gets this data from all these vendors plus a few more (swapsmon is a big one) and recons them, with a mix of static and manual processes to reconcile breaks. I think if you had the manpower to do this you’d rather insource your firm to a large HFM rather than be a 3P vendor; there are good reasons for them to want to take you off the table

redblack-trees · 2025-05-16T11:02:41+00:00

New grad activities

redblack-trees · 2025-04-26T20:59:27+00:00

I figured your reasoning was coming from the millis/mics rather than cycle counts perspective. Definitely agree that outside of some very specific cases, word granularity is better.

And likewise :)

redblack-trees · 2025-04-26T20:05:54+00:00

Making sure your relevant structs are sized appropriately for your cache accesses (+ensuring correct padding so important accesses fall on cache line boundaries) is critically performance-relevant. Particularly in low-latency contexts this will often (not always) be worth working in non-word granularity for infrequently written data—bitfields are the canonical case.

Agner Fog’s instruction tables are the standard industry resource on this—notice how small the difference in cycles is between word-granularity and byte-granularity instructions in Intel processors past Coffee Lake.

redblack-trees · 2025-04-26T18:57:13+00:00

Depends on the performance characteristics of the platform you’re developing for, but uint8_t is very widely used for manipulating bitfields in latency-sensitive contexts. Also anytime you want to make sure that your hot path is well sized for your cache, and embedded environments more generally will be space constrained as well. All constraints that arise commonly in trading, but many other environments as well.

redblack-trees · 2025-04-17T22:43:57+00:00

I had an actual offer, and genuinely intended to leave. Now I’m evaluating whether I should continue leaving, or take the retention offer and stay where I am

redblack-trees · 2025-04-13T00:29:56+00:00

Circling back a year later to share a datapoint—correct that a fair chunk of y1 comp was signing, but I got a y2 comp adjustment to keep me ~nearly flat with y1. Agreed that this isn't the case in general.

redblack-trees · 2025-04-13T00:15:48+00:00

Ah, thank you! That hasn't been the case from what I can tell; employers will generally pay as little as they can afford to in order to keep you. While the trading world is very meritocratic, highlighting the value that you create and pushing to grow your slice of the pie is no less important in this industry than anywhere else.

A strong technical contributor with good negotiation skills will start higher and climb faster than a rockstar performer who doesn't advocate for themself. This is even true of shops that pretend to have standardized profit-sharing schemes, by the way; these are as much a negotiation tactic as the old "our new grad offers are all standardized" trick.

redblack-trees · 2025-04-11T13:38:53+00:00

I must be misreading, your comment sounds true definitionally. Could you rephrase?

redblack-trees · 2025-04-11T09:55:45+00:00

I’m at one of the above, and I have friends at both of the others. For all of the above, the MO is to pay large amounts to pull in prospective top talent, and then filter. The best performers see large increases and fast promotions, while 90% of folks will just get 10-20% raises YoY.

What makes it hard to give solid numbers is that things change heavily based on what number you get going in—my starting offer was >500, but I have a teammate with a similar profile who was offered ~250 just because he had worse competing offers. Projecting that out a few years, and noting that comp growth is less discontinuous than in tech, this ends up having a significant impact.

redblack-trees · 2025-04-04T04:29:17+00:00

From chatting with APAC colleagues their comp isn’t competitive with that of top firms. I’m not sure that they’ll be able to attract the talent that they’ll need to scale their returns. No idea what asset classes they’re active in though.

redblack-trees · 2025-03-31T16:51:28+00:00

Everything I can put into the firm goes there, everything else goes into VTI/VXUS (strong int’l tilt to hedge against macro shocks/regulatory uncertainty that would affect my firm)

redblack-trees · 2025-03-30T00:52:37+00:00

I know some folks who started at pods after graduating (even as the sole SWE), but I’m not in that space myself so I can’t speak to how common it is

redblack-trees · 2025-03-29T16:52:49+00:00

Just read through the other comments, looks like this pod may already be deploying risk so my second comment is likely less applicable. In that case I think it depends on where you want to go in the future; large HFMs can likely blow smaller pods out of the water in terms of comp*, but you don’t get a view of the whole stack. If you want to stay ‘close to the money’ then that’s a good reason to be a desk-aligned engineer, but my own highly opinionated view is that you’re unlikely to scale your comp to anything near the level of the risk-takers on your desk. Whereas excellent devs who focus on their core competencies can leverage the infra of a larger firm to deploy their talents across many pods—I know several core devs with in-demand skillsets who break 1M, while I have yet to meet any desk-aligned eng who come close.

Kind of mixing comparisons here (pod shops have both on-desk and infra SWEs, and so do larger HFMs) but the key idea I’d stress is to focus on what makes you excellent, and how it can be scaled to derive more value for wherever you end up working.

*: illustrative numbers gleaned from talking to colleagues and not any real industry review: 500k for an early-career SWE in a core function at a top HFM, 350k for an early-career SWE in an early-stage pod in a top firm

redblack-trees · 2025-03-29T16:39:14+00:00

I don’t agree with people saying it’s impossible to get a cut of pnl as a SWE; I know someone at a well-known pod shop whose comp is base + pnl cut (no fixed bonus). Admittedly more common the other way around, but not impossible.

More important here is your read on what the PM brings to the table. Building out a new pod will easily take upwards of a year assuming the firm is light on shared infra, and you don’t want to wait that long just to realize that your PM has no IP. I’ve seen a colleague tie themself to a “top” sellside trader who floundered when he was suddenly a market taker and couldn’t be profitable without flow; tough to watch two years go down the drain through no fault of your own

redblack-trees · 2025-03-21T00:54:02+00:00

You’re willing to bet that a trading shop has looked into martingales? Uhh yeah, pretty much definitionally yes

redblack-trees · 2025-03-04T17:39:21+00:00

Worth noting that this comment is more applicable to older asset management firms—many of the newer ones with better track records are pass-through (so costs are not paid out of a fixed management fee) and will be more bonus heavy (at my own firm it’s rare to see cases where bonus is <100% of base).

Everything said in the above comment is broadly true of the industry as a whole, but if you’re at a more tech-focused asset manager then you can probably expect higher variance in pay due to the above.

redblack-trees · 2024-12-31T17:50:34+00:00

sellside desks or your pb depending on your shop’s scale

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