I’m astounded by people who want to ‘know’ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown. -- Woody Allen

An old set of videos that I found extremely interesting. Lex Van Dam, a hedge fund manager in London, picks 8 rookies and gives them a million dollars to manage for two months. This two hour long set of videos brings out so many human dynamics about trading that this can be a fantastic case study in any B school. Will the 8 rookies survive 2 month period?Will they manage to make money ?

In the introduction, the author tries to define HFT using the voices of leading HFT players. What are the characteristics of HFT? There is no agreement on a common definition of HFT, but there are some elements that one can at least attribute to HFT. They are Low latency trading. High turnover strategy. Trader goes home `flat' with no open position. The goal of any HFT firm broadly is to have a set of uncorrrelated trading strategies that has statistically more winners than losers for all the trading positions of the day.

Thanks to my Sitar Sir, I came to know about a concert by Ustad Rais Khan this weekend. Khan Sahab is from Mewati Gharana ( Indore) and plays in “Beenkar Baj Gayaki Ang”. Before the concert began , he told the audience that he was running high fever and was having a severe body ache. He apologized in advance for any mistakes he might commit in the concert. He is 72 years old!

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.