Nimble Market Maker - appreciating hft landscape

The order one importance of profitability is picking pseudo-competitive markets where there is sufficient order flow for pnl while avoiding deep pocketed trading firms. Picking the wrong table stakes is akin to picking off your friends in the uni local poker club and then sitting down next to Ivey, Dwan and Chidwick hoping you will magically appear unscathed.

While we may not be able to achieve similar competitive results on a banana paycheck, being able to understand the table stakes in a given market is critical step in determining prima facie whether we shall take a seat in the first place.

A good appreciation of the artifacts presented can save massive labor and ballpark whether a given trading system has a shot at being competitive in select market.

In this post we will give a light survey of the hft landscape. In the next post we will write Python code for quantitative modelling for table selection of trading strategies relative to the platform. i.e. - given some strategy X, should you trade on Y?