See the article below about high-frequency traders and programmers...
I've spent some time in my career building "real-time" high-performance game code. That work was instrumental in preparing me for my move over to working on trading technologies a few years back in building tools for traders and for the supporting business and technology units within that industry. I really enjoyed that environment and daily challenge -- in that process I ended up inventing new trading screens (I invented the "Time Market Grid Interface" as published by the US Patent office in August) and coding exchange gateways and building upon a variety of risk-management tools. All of this was within the confines of the trading platform vendor business and not within the proprietary trading firm as described in this link below, so I was not in a position to get the kinds of benefits described below...The flip side to that story is that everyone's algos are competing against each other, and if you are working within a market that is effectively a zero-sum game, slow and flawed code will lose...I've experimented with custom automated trading code against simulated markets though, but am hopeful to try them out in the real world!
Go to Article"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street traders aren't what they used to be -- they're not even on Wall Street anymore.
The days of swashbuckling backslappers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have given way to an era of trading dominated by analytical technical whizzes whose computers may be running from a town in deepest New Jersey or Texas."
