[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems en...
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Ask HN: Good resources to learn financial systems engineering?
I work mainly in energy market communications and systems that
facilitate energy trading, balancing and such. Currently most
parties there take minutes to process messages and I think there
could be a lot to learn from financial systems engineering. Any
good resources you can recommend?
Author : _1tan
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-11-23 16:30 UTC (6 hours ago)
| lordnacho wrote:
| I've heard from a friend in the energy trading space that they're
| a bit behind, but your question is still a bit too broad.
|
| What in the financial space do you want to hear about? Networks,
| exchanges, settlement?
| _1tan wrote:
| I am mainly working on B2B message exchange, e.g. via
| AS4/EDIFACT/ebix/CIM files and most parties seem to still work
| with a lot of batch processing. With the ongoing digitization
| of e.g. metering hardware and faster settlement times in the
| energy markets (EU-centric) I think this might not cut it
| anymore in the future.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Find out if they are moving to FIX, FIXFAST, or some sort of
| ITCH (binary) type feed.
| brudgers wrote:
| _Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages_
|
| I suspect that the energy market is a bit different from markets
| where being ruthlessly fast might be a good long term behavior.
| So there might be good reasons for that way of doing business due
| to the specific nature of the energy market.
|
| For example a limited number of counter parties might make stable
| B2B relationships more valuable. Or regulatory compliance might
| require extra steps. Or the messaging system might be noisy.
|
| Or not. I wonder how executives at the trading companies would
| describe the delay.
| roughly wrote:
| One other thing that comes to mind - the players in the
| financial markets make so much money off that message-
| processing speed that it opens up a whole lot of options that
| may not be available to someone without those kinds of deep
| pockets. We're all still fighting Einstein, but the ability to
| just throw resources at the problem can surface some solutions
| that are out of reach when you manufacture something other than
| money.
| brudgers wrote:
| I agree and scale is one of the reasons there's so much money
| to be made. The NYSE trades over $18 billion a day. A small
| edge can be exercised many many times.
| antonvs wrote:
| A lot of settlement in financial markets is still pretty slow.
| That's a big reason why there was so much fintech interest in
| blockchain.
|
| You may be thinking of high frequency trading. In that case,
| traders interact directly with an exchange - e.g. via direct
| market access[1] - so it's a pre-established two-party
| interaction. There's no particular technical difficulty with
| making that fast. Usually, slow transaction times are a
| consequence of the structure of the market, not a technical issue
| particularly.
|
| [1] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/career-
| map/s...
| koliber wrote:
| In the broad picture of engineering, I would consider this to
| be technically difficult. Many pieces of the puzzle need to
| interact correctly to remove latency, from physical location,
| network gear, decision about where software runs, removing
| unnecessary layers of _everything_ , to algos and data
| structures, and doing razor-tight tradeoff analysis favoring
| low-latency at every step along the way. It's also expensive.
| So it's hard to agree that this is not hard. On the flip side,
| if you find this easy and want a job, msg me.
| spprashant wrote:
| Like someone else said your question is kind of broad. But I d
| recommend reading TigerBeetle's documentation to understand how
| financial transaction processing may differ from what they call
| general purpose databases like PostgreSQL.
|
| https://docs.tigerbeetle.com/single-page/#concepts
| ekkeke wrote:
| I work on low(ish) latency trading systems in FX. FIX is the
| standard communication protocol and familiarity with it is
| essential for me. Here you can look up the standard message types
| and tag values: https://fiximate.fixtrading.org/
|
| They also have docs for the standard message flows you can expect
| during trading. I use it regularly.
| superzamp wrote:
| Question is a bit broad, but out of all the concepts under the
| financial engineering umbrella you're bound to explore the
| concept of ledgering eventually.
|
| I've written a bit about it on my own co's product blog in an
| attempt to demystify some core concepts [1], [2], [3].
|
| Still on ledgering and expanding into less mathematical and more
| applied concepts, I can also recommend a book called "The
| Accounting Game: basic accounting fresh from the lemonade stand"
| [4].
|
| [1]: https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/how-not-to-
| build-a... [2]: https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/debits-
| and-credits... [3]:
| https://www.formance.com/blog/engineering/ledgering-all-the-...
| [4]:
| https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Accounting_Game.htm...
| diab0lic wrote:
| There might be some gems for you in this old thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573204
|
| Book recommendations for learning financial systems.
| m-hodges wrote:
| I recently read Central Banking 1011 and learned a lot!
|
| 1 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56863052
| Onavo wrote:
| If you just want to get up to speed on the mathematics,
| Luenberger's Investment Science is a classic.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Investment-Science-David-G-Luenberger...
| wavemode wrote:
| > Currently most parties there take minutes to process messages
| and I think there could be a lot to learn from financial systems
| engineering
|
| Depends on what you mean by "financial systems". There are plenty
| of financial systems that takes days or weeks to fully process
| transactions.
|
| You're probably referring to stock trading systems (which by
| their nature have to be extremely low latency). The term to
| search for is "HFT" (high-frequency trading).
|
| Here is a recent paper on the topic (focused on C++, though most
| things you find will tend to be):
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04259
| dboreham wrote:
| I wouldn't look further than asking what happens currently in the
| processing of these messages. It might turn out for example that
| the minutes delay is deliberate: high frequency trading can
| become unstable more easily than low frequency trading. Perhaps
| there's a human in the loop?
| asalahli wrote:
| Check out The Payments Engineer Playbook[0]. I don't work on
| financial systems but I'm subscribed and like the occasional
| distributed systems insights.
|
| One of the posts turned up on HN front page a year ago[1]. Thats
| how I discovered it
|
| 0. https://news.alvaroduran.com/
|
| 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42269227
| jbarrettcapone wrote:
| I would recommend the Jane Street youtube channel, the ocamal
| focused ones in my opinion you can skip. But otherwise their
| engineering videos will give you a good sense of it. When it
| comes to low latency systems this is a very private ecosystem.
| There are some open source projects for learning some of the
| mechanics of trading, market data and the order to settlement
| lifecycle. I am not aware of any being built for low latency.
|
| Market data ingest, analysis and resulting order execution is
| chewing through way more data way faster than any banking
| transaction system. I have worked on both of them.
|
| If you want more in the weeds but still high level I gave a talk
| on the main concepts and systems you need to know to code low
| latency for markets.
| https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HIPJb0XX3JDHEYSrZC8v...
| yu3zhou4 wrote:
| There a free online accredited master's degree in Financial
| Engineering (https://www.wqu.edu/mscfe), probably not for OP but
| maybe some find it useful for them
| koliber wrote:
| # Books
|
| ## * _Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for
| Practitioners_ by Larry Harris*
|
| - comprehensive overview written in an accessible way
|
| ## * _The Microstructure of Financial Markets_ by Frank de Jong
| and Barbara Rindi*
|
| - 1st 1/4 of the book is generally useful. Then the math starts.
| This math is not needed to get a basic overview.
|
| These are two books I wish someone gave to me when I started my
| first capital markets software engineering job. I recommend them
| to all the people I place in financial system engineering roles.
|
| This is my passion. Message me if you want to talk more about
| this -- see HN profile for contact info.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| I recently learned of Kdb+ and the associated ecosystem of
| financial tools.
|
| May be worth getting a head start on these, I understand these
| are the tools that the HFTs and the quants use.
|
| https://kx.com/products/kdb/
| ofrzeta wrote:
| "The Disruptor is the result of our efforts to build the world's
| highest performance financial exchange at LMAX."
|
| https://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/disruptor.html
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