South Austin C/C++ Monthly "Coffee-and-Career-Talk": High-Frequency Trading

If I had a dollar for every time C++ people mention high-frequency trading to me...I'd be making money in a very weird way. [credit to Mitch Hedberg for that joke :-P]

Anyway, I know HFT is a huge area of interest for many folks. So this time we'll be speaking on the topic with Rob Morgan of Maxwell Analytics, who gave me this interesting pitch:

"Maxwell Analytics is a financial technology startup. We are just closing our first round of funding and are looking to assemble our engineering team.

We are looking for a principal engineer and a few generalists that also have experience in specific domains (machine learning, high performance computation, etc). We have a core technology that should significantly enhance the performance and safety of hedge funds that utilize automated quantitative trading strategies.

The task of automated trading is a fascinating problem in computer science that blends high performance high throughput computation with big data in a realtime geographically distributed environment utilizing a very large code stack. I can think of no other language with the combined flexibility and performance required to tackle this particular application besides c++.

There's a veritable ecosystem of programs that inhabit every niche environment competing for survival--some predatory, some pathological, some benign, and some beneficial. But at the end of the day these systems are inextricably linked to the real economy and our collective well-being."

Whether you love or hate the high-stakes trigger-finger game of high-frequency trading, it sounds like Rob has given it some thought. So I'm betting this will be a valuable conversation.

This meetup leans a little more toward career networking than the North one. But it also does double-duty as our South Austin programmer-talk gathering, so you certainly don't have to be unemployed or underemployed to attend!

NOTE: The venue has food--as well as wine and beer--in case anyone was worried.