In the Jan 2012 issue of “Traders” magazine , I found these points worth noting down : In 2011, Knight Capital earned $172M from market making operations out of its entire on $517M According to a Buy Side survey, the top 5 providers of algo trading systems are Credit Suisse, Goldman, ITG, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch and UBS Aquaequities is a firm that focuses on proving block liquidity by aggregating from various mid tier specialized brokers.

The book starts off with a discussing ‘What’ and ‘Who’ aspects of High Frequency trading systems. What is High Frequency Trading : With the advent of electronic trading , the human market maker has been replaced by electronic market maker. The back end is a programmed strategy that does the market making. HFT’s DNA comprises two elements.First element is the trading strategy that is typically liquidity provision or intra day arb extraction.

Via Number Sleuth : All the gold in the world can be fit in to 3.42 Olympic Swimming pools.

Watching this play is a terrible waste of time. I don’t really understand why such plays are made in the first place. One expects something different from a play as compared to a movie. There are 4 artists in the play who try to put on an accent while speaking , forget dialogues in between, murmur something amongst themselves, talk in an accent that is extremely difficult to follow, and end up enacting a story with no meaning whatsoever.

The title is a marketing ploy so that someone struggling to write, be it a graduate student. a researcher or a professor , buys the book thinking that they will get some magical advice from it. The author himself admits this towards the end of the book that the title is not exactly what the book is all about. He says the actual title should have been, “How To Write More Productively During the Normal Work week with Less Anxiety and Guilt ?