Since the launch of http://fixparser.targetcompid.com, it has been gaining loyal followers and is becoming an indispensable tool for so many of us who work in trading technology. Since there doesn’t seem to be any other forum for developers (and others) involved in any aspect of trading technology, I thought targetcompid.com could fill that role as well.
There are other forums for technologists, such as reddit and hacker news, but their focus is often different from ours. For example, ‘performance’ for them often means scalability or the ability to get their web server to serve millions of clients. Performance, for trading technologists, is more likely to concern latency and throughput.
Forums for IT professionals and software engineers at sites such as elitetrader are usually frequented by retail traders. People who are looking to write a program to automate their trading strategy using a retail application. Such developers are more likely to deal with proprietary APIs such as IB or ninja trader. I expect most of our visitors will be employed at hedge funds, broker dealers, exchanges, etc.
Lastly, forums like Wilmott and Nuclear Phynance cater more to quants. People who are essentially applied mathematicians, who’s strategies are housed in trading systems, fed data from market data feeds and their order routed through pipelines setup by the kind of person who might visit this forum.
There is a need for community of trading technologists, such as:
- Software engineers
- Support staff which use tools built by software engineers
- Network specialists
- Tech. savvy traders
Let’s help each other be better at our jobs.