There are jobs in high frequency trading, apparently
According to Rick Bookstaber there are jobs to be had in high frequency trading. Recruiters say Rick is speaking the truth.
"High frequency has been a good area for hiring for a while," says David Durham of hedge fund-focused recruiter Durham Associates. "It's one of the hot parts of the market at the moment," agrees Dominic Connor, director of P&D Quantitative Recruitment. "It's mostly prop shops and hedge funds that are hiring," he adds.
High frequency funds' appeal lies in the fact that their leverage is usually low and risk is seen as manageable because trades deal with fractional movements over minute amounts of time.
Bradley Duke, managing director of institutional electronic sales at Knight Capital, says multilateral trading facilities like Chi-X, are also driving high frequency growth by pushing trading costs down.
If you want to get into high frequency trading, Connor says you'll need to be proficient at C++ and that it will help if you know something about signal processing.
The downside is that Bookstaber says high frequency trading's days are numbered because of capacity constraints and hardware costs.
