[Beowulf] Pricing and Trading Networks: Down is Up, Left is Right

[Joachim Worringen]

Vincent,

I haven't read all zillion lines of your posts, but as I'm heading
software engineering of a very successful "prop shop" (proprietary
trading company), I might add some real-world comments:
- Execution speed is important, but it's not everything. Only the
simplest strategies purely rely on speed for success.
- Even more important than execution speed is time-to-market. It's of
no use to have the superfast thing ready when the market has moved
into a different direction nine months ago.
- Equally important is reliability and maintainability.

Our inhouse development is based on C++, but we make very good money
with Java-based third-party solutions as well.

FPGAs are not the silver-bullet-solution either. Finding people to
program them is hard, development is complex and takes time, verifying
them takes even more, and is required for every little change. Think
about time-to-market. Therefore, they are mainly used in limited
scenarios (risk-checks), or are used with high-level-compiler support,
giving away significant fraction of the potential performance.

Oh, btw, we are always looking for bright, but also socially compliant
developers.

 Joachim