As already said both here and in previous threads: HFT is for big players; requires:
- hosting on exchanges premises to cut roundtrip delay (µS speaking). Also, very often, you'll be throttled depending on how much you pay. For entry fees, you'll be limited to ridiculous rate such as 20 msgs/sec.
- man years of development. Basically, when starting from scratch, we develop Direct Market Access gateways (i.e, custom/proprietary access to exchanges) in 3 to 5 man-months (using an in house framework).
And they sit on top of other products that have dedicated teams working fulltime for years.
- upkeep: exchanges update their systems once/twice a year. Migrations take somewhere from a few hours to weeks, or a from scratch when they rewrite their complete API. If you can't keep up with the updates, you won't be able to trade.
And here, we're only speaking about trading. As highlighted, you also need market data, both retrieval and processing. Then and only then you'll be able to seriously start trading. (and then you'll want to do some back office stuff)
- hosting on exchanges premises to cut roundtrip delay (µS speaking). Also, very often, you'll be throttled depending on how much you pay. For entry fees, you'll be limited to ridiculous rate such as 20 msgs/sec.
- man years of development. Basically, when starting from scratch, we develop Direct Market Access gateways (i.e, custom/proprietary access to exchanges) in 3 to 5 man-months (using an in house framework). And they sit on top of other products that have dedicated teams working fulltime for years.
- upkeep: exchanges update their systems once/twice a year. Migrations take somewhere from a few hours to weeks, or a from scratch when they rewrite their complete API. If you can't keep up with the updates, you won't be able to trade.
And here, we're only speaking about trading. As highlighted, you also need market data, both retrieval and processing. Then and only then you'll be able to seriously start trading. (and then you'll want to do some back office stuff)
> The trading fee is close to $10/order
Deal breaker, especially for HFT.