https://blog.turboawesome.win/tags/finance/ Recent content in Finance on Bits, Trades & Systems Hugo en-us Wed, 09 Jan 2019 09:04:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2019/01/why-i-left-on-risk-pace-and-ownership/ Wed, 09 Jan 2019 09:04:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2019/01/why-i-left-on-risk-pace-and-ownership/ After three years at a large financial institution, why I took a significant pay cut to join a tiny startup. The reasoning, the fears, and whether it was the right call. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2018/07/event-sourcing-in-financial-systems-real-benefits-real-costs/ Wed, 11 Jul 2018 11:03:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2018/07/event-sourcing-in-financial-systems-real-benefits-real-costs/ Event sourcing is a natural fit for financial systems that require audit trails and point-in-time reconstruction. The costs are real too — projections, eventual consistency, and the event schema evolution problem. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2017/10/building-mifid-ii-trade-reporting-infrastructure-an-engineers-view/ Tue, 03 Oct 2017 11:45:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2017/10/building-mifid-ii-trade-reporting-infrastructure-an-engineers-view/ MiFID II required every trade to be reported within 15 minutes of execution. Building the infrastructure to meet that requirement across a large, heterogeneous estate taught us about the gap between regulatory requirements and production reality. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2017/01/kafka-in-finance-what-exactly-once-actually-costs-you/ Tue, 10 Jan 2017 11:22:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2017/01/kafka-in-finance-what-exactly-once-actually-costs-you/ Kafka's exactly-once semantics arrived in 0.11 with significant caveats. Using it in a regulated financial context forced a clear-eyed view of what the guarantee actually covers and what it doesn't. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/10/kdb-/q-for-java-developers-reading-the-matrix/ Tue, 11 Oct 2016 14:17:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/10/kdb-/q-for-java-developers-reading-the-matrix/ KDB+ is the database of choice for time-series analytics in investment banks. It's fast, alien, and worth understanding. A Java developer's field guide. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/07/time-series-data-at-a-bank-why-relational-databases-break-and-what-comes-next/ Wed, 06 Jul 2016 11:34:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/07/time-series-data-at-a-bank-why-relational-databases-break-and-what-comes-next/ Financial institutions generate millions of time-stamped data points every day. The relational database model, designed for transactional workloads, breaks down spectacularly for this use case — here's why, and what replaces it. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/04/why-the-risk-team-chose-clojure-and-why-it-made-sense/ Tue, 05 Apr 2016 14:17:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/04/why-the-risk-team-chose-clojure-and-why-it-made-sense/ A Lisp in a large financial institution sounds like a punchline. The reasoning behind the decision was more principled than the stereotype suggests. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/01/when-the-scale-changes-moving-into-institutional-finance/ Wed, 06 Jan 2016 10:31:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2016/01/when-the-scale-changes-moving-into-institutional-finance/ Four years in a latency-obsessed trading environment, then a move to a large financial institution where the problems — and the constraints — were completely different. https://blog.turboawesome.win/2012/03/understanding-the-fx-spot-market-from-an-engineers-chair/ Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:44:00 +0000 https://blog.turboawesome.win/2012/03/understanding-the-fx-spot-market-from-an-engineers-chair/ What actually happens when a currency is traded: the market structure, the participants, and the data flows that an engineer building FX systems needs to understand before writing a line of code.