The Financial Times says hedge funds and investment banks are no longer interested in simple traders: they want 'computer scientists' instead. People who can code algorithms are suddenly more precious than people who've studied market trends.
Coding skills will do more than get you a job in trading, however. They might also make your life easier. Traders on Twitter are circulating a series of 'life hacks' allegedly uncovered at a Russian technology firm after a top programmer was poached by a rival.
The programmer in question had allegedly set up a series of scripts to reduce his workload. "If anything took more than one and a half minutes, he wrote a script for it," says the colleague who discovered the scripts after he'd moved on.
They included: