What kind of depreciation do you get on crypto mining hardware though? Will that setup still be profitable in x months, when better performing hardware exists?
The hardware pays for itself with current conditions remain constant (which is never the case!) in about 8 months.
It uses high end graphics cards RTX 3060Ti and RTX 3080 that shouldn't go to zero resale value even in a year or two.
Mining for the same coin typically produces less and less of that coin due to difficulty increase.
However difficulty increase for the same coin typically associated with it's price increase as well.
So to derive most benefits from mining it's better to mine solid coins (like ETH right now) and hold them.
I currently mining non-ETH coin that increased in price 30% in a week by itself.
So this helps to make this venture more beneficial.
And then I use dedicated mining OS (HiveOS) that allows to control the whole thing fully remotely and in fact switch mining to more profitable coins dynamically.
Curious to know where you are running your mining rig? in your house/apartment or you rented some other place? Also is there any limit on how much electricity you can use in apartment/House?
Interesting - I have looked into the API, though TT tech support believe they can fix the issues I'm seeing. Any reason for choosing F#/WPF over C#/Winforms?
And agree 100% on Xtrader - very strange business decision to discontinue a 15 year old piece of software than thousands of users are willing to pay $1200 per month for!
re WPF vs winforms: consensus recommendation would be WPF. But for something you're building for yourself, WPF has a lot of complexity that you may not get much benefit from. If you decide on WPF, don't use xaml! Separating dynamic UI into a static markup language is a complexity disaster that will cost you a lot of time. (Note that google results are dominated by xaml answers, so if you want code-only answers it's best to search github.)
Best approach may be a third option, at least as a prototype. Use Excel, with a RTD server that connects to TT. Uninstall the Bloomberg Excel Tools add-in and use direct calls into BBG's own RTD server, i.e., =RTD("BLOOMBERG.RTD","","VGA INDEX", "LAST_PRICE") instead of BDP(...) for market data (~100x faster), and you can get to an 80% solution very quickly.
re F# vs C#, I had used C# for a decade before switching (after I had a vacation ruined because of a multi-threading bug in our position-sizing model. Multi-core parallelism is much easier in F# due to default immutability). If you play around with the F# REPL you'll pretty quickly find out whether the language fits your mind well or not. For me, as soon as I read this code (http://fssnip.net/5I), I knew I had found my native language.
Not an expert on what is possible in that space these days but FPS is actually not that important in trading guis because you don’t need the whole canvas to refresh like you do in something like a shooter.
You don’t have to redraw a lot of things on each event because ladders and the like are mostly static while graphs are only dynamic in the tails.
Without observing your specific use case it is impossible to know what is causing your perception of lag, but I’d be shocked if it was bare refresh rate.
I’d guess their crappy code is just pissing off and not doing anything for big stretches of time because it isn’t good.
Not really sure, as it's not my field, but the graphics requirements are not about "drawing" - more about rapidly updating multiple grids of numbers without any lag.
There have always been middlemen, as, especially with less liquid instruments, there won't necessarily be equal supply and demand from "natural" buyers and sellers. As markets have gone from floor trading, to point+click on computer screens, to automation of different levels of sophistication, efficiency has improved - people complain about HFT stealing pennies, but in the past, someone was stealing quarters. The difference is that the skills required have changed tremendously - a few years ago, it was all about being well connected or going to the right school - now it's all about how good your code is.
It's not particularly surprising that the loudest anti-HFT voices are guys whose profit margins have been killed by it.
Disclosure: my profit margins have been killed by HFT...
I don't think the actual order type was a secret, just that some HFT firms figured out a way to use it which gave them an advantage over other HFT firms. The firms who didn't understand it lost out.
The whole point is that these 'smarter strategies' are only smarter because they are exploiting arbitrary API conventions, not smarter because they improve the utility of markets to society in general. Which is a tragedy, because if all these geniuses were working in the fields they trained in - computer science, physics, or bioinformatics - they would be contributing to society on a more fundamental level.
There are several fallacies to this sort of argument:
1) The myth of the HFT geniuses. Like any other industry there are smart people in HFT, there are also dumb people & bad software developers. In some ways the industry is very insular and has many bad habits.
2) We could harness all these people to something that provides more utility. It would be great if that were true, but how do you do that? Historically, centrally planning what careers people are required to follow has led to pretty bad outcomes. Conversely, if you think you can provide more utility by hiring away some of these smart people, nothing is stopping you.
Your first point isn't a fallacy to the argument. If they are good enough to to a job there, they're good enough to do a job elsewhere.
Your second point is trivially answered: you let the market decide where they work.
That's not obvious to you because you conflate "provide utility" with "make money". There are lots of things that make money that provide no utility. A large part of the history of business regulation is basically restricting those so people focus on providing utility rather than making money at things that provide zero or negative societal value.
The argument you respond to is basically suggesting that HFT is not generating any value for society. If you want to demonstrate that it's false, you have to show that HFT creates value in line with its costs.
Fine, but why doesn't every new industry have to make this same argument?
It's pretty obvious to me that social networks have some pretty dangerous attributes (decrease in privacy & personal securty, etc) to them. Do these dangerous attributes outweigh the value that twitter provides? Who decides and why?
Fine, but why doesn't every new industry have to make this same argument?
Because most new industries aren't within the financial industry, messing with the fundamental operation of markets. Those that are have to make that argument.
I think every new industry does have to make this argument. And they have to make it to their industry regulators and to the people who employ them. That is we, the people.
Myth? The finance industry, where the HFT folks are near the top, pays epic salaries for the smartest people. They do this to hire the best and the brightest, and would not continue to do so if it did not work.
In the documentary, Haim relates a story where the team that he was on included PhDs in bioinformatics, physics, and mathematics. This does not look like a myth to me. The mathematical knowledge required to understand and be competitive in the HFT environment, coupled with the software development knowledge is very rare. This industry consumes the time of geniuses in order to function and pays them well for it - that this attracts dumb people and bad software developers that are occasionally hired hardly makes the existence of these geniuses a myth.
> 2) We could harness all these people to something that provides more utility. It would be great if that were true, but how do you do that?
Disclaimer) I work in HFT and this is all anecdotal.
I have found very little correlation between advanced degrees and ability to determine valuable trading strategies. In fact, the strategies that most people bemoan the most with HFT require the least amount of mathematics because they are very simple.
I've also worked outside of trading in both big institutions & start ups. The ratio of genius to average to bad seems about the same in all of these environments.
As far as the common pool resource approach, the problem with that is that it will most likely tilt the balance of power in the markets even further into the hands of a few giant institutions. Why it is popular to protect the poor investment bankers from the ravages of HFT baffles me.
I agree that there are improvements that could be made to the HFT world. Most notably, eliminating the subpenny rule, which acts as a minimum wage for HFT:
I don't think that someone as apparently smart as Haim is spent a year of his life troubleshooting an API call. There's got to be more to it than that.
Generally it's possible to colocate servers in the same datacentre as the exchange servers. This isn't really a competitive advantage though, as anyone who needs latency that low will be doing the same, and the costs will be relatively insignificant compared to salaries of people who can build the required systems.
While I completely agree that there is no advantage over other HFT competitors provided by being located within the exchange datacentre, there is a disadvantage to not being there. This gives the exchange an opportunity to make a significant amount of money from each HFT company without hurting other customers.
