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- Finished Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt.
- Solution: build an exchange (IEX) with a deliberate delay (few hundred microseconds) so that HFTs can’t frontrun other investors.
- This was one of the first instances where wall street intimately utilized technologists, for both HFT opportunism and rectification. They were valued like traders on the floor, for the first time.
- Scale: although frequencies of ~microseconds were GOLD to traders, that’s not all that fast in engineering terms. Coming from other disciplines, those speeds and concurrency regimes are relatively simple infrastructures.
- Brad Katsuyama (RBC->IEX).
- Allen Zhang (IEX->Citadel).
- Biggest stock exchanges in the world by market cap 2019: 1 NYSE, 2 Nasdaq, 3 japan, 4 china, 5 hong kong, 6 eurozone, 7 london.
- Tesla, with its current market cap of ~140b, issued 2b worth of new stock. Market value dropped briefly but recovered quickly.
- Trump allegedly doesn’t like Amazon because Bezos owns The Washington Post. Could be a lurking variable in the JEDI/Microsoft contract.
- Watched the big short. Similar to the book, I’m struck by how much comes out of the simple obscurity of the market. Exchanges, brokers, loans, banks, everything. The system is divided enough to be confusing, which allows loopholes to be taken advantage of. Everyone is an expert in their piece, but no one comprehends the whole thing; even the SEC.
- Started another show: Billions on showtime. Lots of finance media lately!
- Settled phone bills since last, looks like 6/8.
- Started settling all apartment fees, divisions, bills.
- Talked with a friend’s father about personal finance, wealth management, pivoting from engineering, more.
