I work at an algorithmic trading shop and have spent a fair amount of time studying equity market structure. It's great to see an open source trading platform, but I think it's important to stress the following: Equity markets are highly competitive. If you choose to use this platform for trading, you will lose money on average. As a retail trader, you face numerous disadvantages that many market participants do not face. By increasing your trading frequency, you will increase your costs and decrease the likelihood that you will make money. Good luck!

Is it just a coincidence that Kansas City is also home to a very small shop that frequently accounts for 10% of US equity volumes?

Yes. BATS has been a positive member of KCMO's tech community for years and had no part in KCK landing the Google Fiber deal.

Much smaller shop than BATS. I believe they have less than 20 employees.

Are you referring to BATS?

Well, the cost of the initial device is $90. I suspect there's a comfortable margin on that. Beyond that, there are a variety of ways that you can pay for additional services. For example, $2.99 / month for higher speeds. You can also pay for more bandwidth ($20 / month for 2 GB). I ordered a device on Monday and got a confirmation that it will arrive in 4-7 days.

You can exchange it for something that you can eat and you can exchange it for somebody to build a house for you, just like dollars. Unlike dollars, you can't produce it out of thin air.

You used to be able to exchange salt, seashells, large stones for all these. Try getting someone to build you a house for salt. Gold could be worth 1/10th of what it is worth today (purchase power) or it could be worth x10 in 10 years. It's purely a speculative play, people pay more because they think someone else will pay more tomorrow. That's all it is.

Sure. Here's a great video on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTUY16CkS-k

Downvoting because this isn't so much an explanation of QE as a biased dialog put into cartoon form.

Here's something a little better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing

Hi Eric - Firstly, thanks for the work that you do. I can always rely on nanex research to produce thoughtful and interesting discussions.

Many of the "bots" in your research seem to be adding quotes that are far away from NBBO. One theory is that these exist to provide market participants with more precise measures of their own latency - almost like echo location. They send out a pattern to the exchange, and then wait until they see it coming back on their market data feed. I think that its good for market participants to have an accurate means of measuring market data latency and that having that means ultimately enhances the efficiency of the market. Do you disagree with this stance? Is there some other better means of measuring latency that would be better for market participants to use?

Tableau does nearly instant plotting of millions of data points with a nice user interface; it may be worth checking out if your job depends on visualizing massive amounts of data.

This is great. Do you have any solution for highly sensitive data?

If only there was some other means of social collaboration. Threads tend to enforce a hierarchy that is not enforced in normal social situations. If several root level comments all present the same idea, maybe it would make sense to respond to all of them with a single well structured response. The only way to do that with threads is via copy/paste. If only there was less structure. Maybe a collaborative note-taking technology is the solution?

Here's the secret sauce: http://appli8.hec.fr/rosu/research/news.pdf

Awesome, thanks for the reference!