Compared to what the top traders make, 0.5Mil / year is pretty embarrassing.

IT is generally considered a cost centre in banking, in essence, and so not rewarded like real traders, or sales people.

Not in HFT. It's one of their core competencies.

Well then where does the renumeration disparity come from?

Yes, consultants make more, but I'm under the impression that most consultants can't fill 8 (or more) hours a day?

We have lunch, meetings, smoke breaks and daydreaming to fill those hours.

From "Anonymous Cowards" calculations it was more like $74/hr if you consider overtime/oncall:

$500,000 divide by 52 weeks = $9,615 / week

$9,615 / (40 hours + (60 hours overtime x 1.5)) = $73.96 hourly wage

> I work 12 hours a day on average and do 100 hour weeks.

His average week seems to be closer to 60 hours, 100 hour weeks just happen once in a while, also I'm pretty sure he gets some time off, just has to remain available. So it's more like

$500,000 divided by 50 weeks = $10,000 / week

$10,000 / (40 hours + (20 hours overtime x 1.5)) = $142.86 hourly wage

Or it may be completely random and the numbers are made up.

I like how you cite 'Anonymous Coward' as if there is only one. :)

I was pretty shocked with I saw that guy said he hoped to make $500k for the year. Sounds like the profits aren't making their way down to the developers.

The reason why profits don't flow down is because the buck doesn't stop with them. There are plenty of developers making much more, but in those cases they take the fall if a trading strategy loses money. Those developers that do take the risks make more if the firm makes more money, but also lose their jobs if they make a really bad trade.

Same is true in other software development outfits as well. Lower-level programmers have much more job security but don't have as great a payout

Why would developers be making trading strategy?

Most ultra low latency trading strategies are intimately related to the technology platform. Here's an example strategy:

Most platforms slow down when there is an influx of orders into the market. Some are designed to force events during the process (which allows for action while prices move, but the prices may be stale) and others are designed to process all feed messages before forcing an event (which ensure prices are more up-to-date but doesnt allow you to make a trade earlier)

Suppose you are betting that this represents a market rally or collapse (directional). Then, you can make money by figuring out the direction of the move (aggressive processing of the first few messages in a burst) and get involved before every other system catches up in the feed.

Now, it would be very hard to imagine a non-developer having enough of an understanding of the technology to devise this strategy. Not all examples are so obvious, but many microstructure strategies depend on some understanding of the technologies involved

Quants

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_analyst

HFT?

It's a little nuts that making $500k a year doesn't even get you in the door on a "top salary".