@jihadkong's comment on 'hedge fund stories :marseytypinglaugh:'

I started working as an engineer in a HFT firm a few months ago, and all of the guys here love telling wacky and possibly-made-up stories to me so I thought I would share with my friends on rDrama :marseywhirlyhat:

In no particular order:

Testing schmesting

One team doesnt believe in testing, they just make a change and then hit prod to see what happens. I literally could not believe this is even allowed under regulatory laws, but then I found out they trade crypto so that explains that I guess.

This has resulted in, among other things, attempting to place orders for $3trillion, and submitting 40 thousand orders to the exchange with "🙂" as the execution ID due to char pointers pointing to garbage memory.

Ctrl-C

At one guys previous firm in the early 00s, they were running a fairly sophisticated prop trading business across the world (USA, Athens, Tokyo).

Because it was the early 00s, literally every machine relied on a single service, running on a box in the middle of the office :marseyretard2:

One day someone who sits next to this random computer decides they want the monitor for themself, so they ctrl-C the single process powering the entire firm and unplug the computer. This causes all trading (and cancelling, which is the scary part) to stop working for 25 minutes.

The next day when the guy came into work, every single key on his keyboard had been ripped out except for the Ctrl and the C keys.

Filing at the strip club

A LONG long time ago, one of the guys used to be a pit trader. This means that instead of electronic trading, you did your trading by waving your arms and yelling at a broker from across the room.

Old pit traders are easy to spot at any firm, since young traders are pencil-necked nerds :zoomer: , and pit traders are borderline-r-slurred gigachads :marseyretardchad: who can actually tell a joke.

Anyway, he told me about how one time he was making fun of one of the brand new electronic traders, and pressed a random button on the guy's keyboard as a prank. The way it was set up was that whenever a trade went out, it would make a little "beep" sound. There were a dozen or so computers, so there would normally be a beep every couple seconds (this was early days, so they did hardly any electronic trading).

After this :marseyretardchad: pressed the button, every single computer in the room started going "BRRRRRRRRR" non-stop, until someone could flag the brokers (who were in a different floor of the building) and beg them to cut the DMA link.

Afterwards they had 100s of pages of trades printed out, and :marseyretardchad: had to sit in the office with the brokers until 4am with a marker pen, crossing out individual trades one at a time.

At 4am, the guys decided to go out to a strip club, and they dragged :marseyretardchad: and the brokers with them, forcing them to sit at a table at the strip club and keep going through all the trades while everyone else had a fun time.