A recent trend has emerged, with a notable outflow of engineering talent from the renowned hedge fund DE Shaw careers to firms like Hudson River Trading (HRT) and OpenAI.

The rise of quantitative approaches to trading has created a clear divide between retail traders relying on intuition and institutional players leveraging sophisticated mathematical models and quantative trading firms and high-frequency trading (HFT) systems.

  The core currency in this world is latency – the delay between an event (like a market data update) and the system's reaction (like placing an order).