dev_jim

1) Deals can always fall apart.

2) Shorting isn't free. It will costs money to borrow the stock. You have to borrow it for more than 6 months until the deal closes.

Cringely should stick to commenting on tech as opposed to the validity of raising debt to do share buybacks in a low interest rate environment.

Sorry, you are mixing and matching concepts from reading too many articles on HFT.

> the dark pool operators make money from the HFT's not in terms of the commission, but in terms of collocating fees,

No. Dark pool don't really charge collocation fees. Barclays LX didn't. Most dark pools are in Weehawken and it's just a simple $500 cross-connect from your existing trading system.

> market data fees

It's a dark pool. There is no market data to charge a fee from.

> , and the right to be one of only a few HFTs allowed in the dark pool via collocating, ie exclusivity.

Not in the case of Barclays LX. They let every HFT in at very low rates which is the entire point of the article.

I agree. It helped me when I was a bit rusty with data structures and was looking for a new job recently. And if you can try and re-implement the data structures in a different way. For example, the JDK HashMap uses chaining so try and build an open addressing one. Not only does it teach you about data structures themselves but it gets you practicing coding very quickly for these toy coding problems that get thrown at you during interviews.

Get a job in trading and you can change the world.

How does Wall St always seem to end up with the blame on these threads? They priced the Facebook IPO too high and they get the blame, they priced the Twitter IPO too low and they get the blame. The company just went public and raised $2B+ at a higher valuation initial valuation then anyone expected. IPOs are tricky things to get right. Give it a few months for the hype to settle down before you start screaming about "joe public".

Bonus is part of an overall compensation package. Its not payment for 'overtime'. Its just a different risk/reward calculation then only salary. The key point in all of this is to have a mutual understanding of expectations with your manager.

> that consistent hard work generally results in rather substantially increased compensation and opportunity in the long term.

I agree. I don't think I'd be in the same place in my career today if I had a "working for free" attitude. Sometimes it was more hours and sometimes it was just a genuine curiosity about taking on challenges that are completely foreign to me.

Getting increases in comp is always a long-term game. There's no road map (i.e., work 2 more hours building this to get that experience which will increase my market value by X) and you'll go down a lot of wrong roads that will add zero to your market value. More importantly it requires delayed gratification. There can be a long delay between the work you put in and the payoff.

"Working for free" after 40 hours never resonated with me. It comes out of hard fought labor battles, but an assembly line is difficult to relate to when I'm eating free snacks in my comfy Aeron chair and working on things that generally interest me.

I think the biggest issue here is misaligned expectations between boss and worker. Personally, I've always gone into a job understanding what it was going to take to be successful. My comp expectations are adjusted accordingly. In trading bonds, which is nearly a 24 hour market, it does require >8 hours on the trading floor. At the end of the year my boss doesn't really care about my hours as long as our customers are happy and I've produced PnL.

> I have a finance background and previously worked for UBS and in retail and wholesale stockbroking. I fully understand the role of, say, market makers in the financial system (ie providing liquidity).

> I hear those same arguments being used for HFT but honestly they don't really stack up (IMHO). <snip> It must be a challenge and I'm sure you can make a lot of money, which is fine, but it doesn't really contribute anything to the financial system.

These two statements stand in direct contrast. If you understand the role of market makers then you should understand that the most popular HFT strategy is to be an electronic market maker. It's about competition for liquidity provision which tightens spreads which reduce the cost of trading for everyone.

> 2. Not allowing investment banks to fail ("too big to fail" like Merrill Lynch). Bailouts of investment banks could reasonably be described as welfare for investment bankers;

This would have caused the collapse of the global economy. Google would have suffered mightily from the following depression. Companies like ML might "deserve" to be punished and that process is now working it's way through the courts, but that bailout cost a lot less than 25% unemployment.

> 3. Allowing banks to take positions as well as operate as market makers. There really should be strict separation here;

By it's very definition, a market maker must take proprietary positions.

> 5. Strict regulation on commodities market to separate speculators from hedgers. Driving up food prices causing untold misery even death should result in criminal liability for the organization and key personnel.

Hyperbole. There's never been any evidence that speculation on commodities is "driving up food prices" let alone causing "misery event death".

Common enough. Skills are so specialized thhough that it doesn't always make sense to switch though. Its a different career track, not a promotion. Top end trader will make more but top end developer will make more then the average trader. You should focus on what you are good at.

The closer to the trade you are the higher bonus is as a percentage of your total comp. I did mention "front office" in my original post.

- Infrastructure is vital to most trades. Bonuses are going to more than 30% if you're on the cutting edge here - prop shops, some technology oriented hedge funds, and some banks.

- If by tools you mean GUIs then no.

- Engineers who write trading algos (or more likely algo components that are used by a trader at a higher level) will have a bonus that is more than 30%.

> For any job that you're likely to get in your 20s, NYC finance jobs pay worse, have far longer hours, and are much more high-pressure.

If you're working in the front office then your pay is going to be a multiple of a startup job. And it's going to be significantly higher then any established company in the area (Amazon, Facebook, Google). A good rule of thumb is your base will be similar what established companies pay and your bonus is all gravy.

Pressure and hours vary by firm. It's hard to generalize.

If it trades on the public U.S. equity markets then there's no special information available to accredited investors.

Those movies were addressing a contemporary phenomenon when inequality took off again after being relatively dormant since the 1920's. A combination of deregulation, a reduction in top tax rate, and demand for all kinds of debt caused an explosion of wealth on Wall Street. Meanwhile the rest of city was still recovering from being bankrupt in the 70s.