Re: High-speed trading is no longer the viable money generator it was
>This is not necessarily relevant - a not especially important financial process might easily generate enough revenue to cover the relatively small sums required for the engineering.
Allow me to rephrase that my good sir(/lady). Many of the leading firms have left the market as the profit dried up due to increased competition from competing firms and the large financial corporations. This is not due to someone pulling a Knight Capital at these companies, but rather market conditions. IIRC the number I heard was that profit in the entire industry last year was 20% of profits five years prior - the single year, not all five years.
Costs are not small, the increase in both hardware and software required to stay in the game is not trivial. The maths and coders who work in this field are paid multiples of the IT industry ranges. Pretty much most of the cost is the software, and the rest is hardware which also has to be turned over quicker than normal.
This means that the returns for risk are no longer sufficient for some to justify being part of the market. In the last year, a company with no financial issues left the market and was unable to find a buyer where 12 months before they had been offered in the neighbourhood of $US 300-400 million.
I posit that not only is it relevant, it is the only relevant thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
