Anyone here in ‘Electronic Trading’?
starting my S&T internship soon, have access to some Electronic Trading personnel and am wondering if that’s a good niche to explore.
If anyone here works in an Electronic Trading group, what’s your day to day look like? how’s comp compared to more traditional desks? regrets? Is your background in CS or do you support the product with your more traditional knowledge?
My guy everyone uses electricity for sales and trading.. Not sure what more info do you need
usually the e-trading team at a bank handles the algo trading part of the desk client flows (the smaller size flows) to free up the human traders to deal with the larger block trades.
for example, on the US Treasury desk, the e-trading book might auto-quote all electronic client trades from TradeWeb and Bloomberg BBT and all the other electronic client trading inquiries under ~20k dv01 (100mm 2yr notes, 40mm 5yr notes, 20mm 10y notes...10mm 30 yr bonds, etc..)...and then auto hedge all those trades. This e-trading book will acquire a large portfolio of positions over time (because off-the-runs have no liquid market)...and so then the desk needs to decide how to flatten this book. Either hand it over to the human traders as positions get bigger...or let the quants try to build an algo to prop trade out of those client positions.
the e-trading book gets all the small to mid size flows...hedges those flows, and does a little algo prop trading to try to flatten the book when it can. The algo prop trading aspect of e-trading can be very profitable if the quants find a pattern to prop trade that works (and usually when this happens, those quants then goto a hedge fund like Citadel so that they can get paid for this new found profitable knowledge)