I feel like that a lot and I think it can happen with any profession. When you turn your interests and hobbies into a profession, you are bound to reach a point when you don't enjoy it anymore. I think a better, and a more balanced, approach is to keep some distance between your work and passion/hobbies.
This allows you to enjoy your hobbies without being bogged down by usual bureaucracy/pressure that you might deal with at work. So, continue working in tech (maybe reevaluate your role, amount of responsibility etc) and take music lessons, volunteer, join sport leagues, take pottery lessons etc.
Ah, I hear that a lot from customers I work with. A true event-driven system requires both events and webhooks. You will always have apps that only interact via REST so you can't really use streaming architecture here but you can make them more real-time via webhooks.
The article talks about issues with webhooks such as not being reliable if the service goes down and messages are lost. It also talks about developers daisy-chaining multiple services together to put forward a solution which is not robust.
That's why you need a broker that does event distribution, supports multi-protocols (REST, AMQP, MQTT, WebSockets...) natively without any proxies and supports Webhooks. You can push messages to your REST clients and if they disconnect, the messages will pile up in a queue, ready to be consumed when the client reconnects.
Solace PubSub+ Broker does all of this. Disclaimer: I work at Solace.
Just to clarify...AMQP is a protocol so you will need a broker that supports it. The two options I see for you are RabbitMQ and Solace. Both support AMQP.
I recommend checking out Solace. They have been in business for 20 years. It's not open source though but packs all the enterprise features you would need.
That's a shame. I work at Solace so shoot me a message and I will show you how to set it up if you are interested.
Solace's first product was hardware appliances which are still used for high throughput and low latency usecases. Concept of VPN was used to set up isolated virtual brokers so different teams can have their own environments on a shared hardware appliance.
The concept was ported over to software as well and is extremely useful in an enterprise environment. It allows different teams to have their own virtual brokers but not have to pay for or manage multiple brokers.
Basically, if you want to buy AAPL at $100 and as your broker, I take that info and share it with someone else, such as an HFT, they will quickly (milliseconds/nanoseconds) buy AAPL and sell you at a higher price. So, while you expected to pay $100, you ended up paying $100.10.
Now that doesn't seem a lot to you but times the difference (10 cents) by volume and number of Robinhood customers placing orders and it can add up to be a lot.
The buy ahead of you scenario described in this comment is not what the allegations are in the filing (and wouldn’t work in practice because of the way exchanges work).
What is actually being alleged here is that Robinhood did not fulfill their obligation to secure the best price. There is a literal system in the US equities space that says what the best price for a symbol is across the exchanges.
The internalizer can arbitrage this system due to physics & CAP there on but they can also do it in more prosaic ways, by having previous inventory that is priced better or by simply taking the spread between an internal netting (thus internalizing it).
In any case it’s Robinhood who holds the fiduciary duty not the internalizer so if they aren’t getting appropriate execution they need to change their contracts with the internalizers, switch to a different set or send directly to lit exchanges (which destroys their business model & likely gives worse execution than a more fair internalization setup would).
This is wrong on several levels. First of all limit orders place a limit on the worst case price that can be executed but SEC rules impose a duty to execute orders at the best price. If there's a $100 buy order and the best price is 99 dollars, then there is a duty to fill the order at 99 dollars.
Second, the allegation made by the SEC, for which they most likely have very strong evidence, is that Robinhood didn't fulfill its duty to execute orders at the best price to the tune of some 30 million dollars.
Not a market order which majority of people on Robinhood are using market orders since they are the default. Most don't even know what a limit order is I'm guessing.
I disagree that your sentence fragment is all the press release says. I believe the press release says a lot more, such as Robinhood making substantial amounts of money from pay for order flow and Robinhood executing orders at prices that are not only worse than what is available on the market, but also worse than competing brokers, and this in spite of the fact that Robinhood advertises this to the contrary.
These facts taken together can not be used to "mean pretty much anything". These facts, along with the additional fact that the SEC is charging Robinhood of engaging in illegal activity, strongly suggest illegal activity involving pay for order flow that resulted in worse price execution to the customer.
If you think that means "pretty much anything" then we can simply agree to disagree on this matter.
> Robinhood executing orders at prices that are not only worse than what is available on the market, but also worse than competing brokers
This sentence doesn't make much sense given how PFOF works. It would make sense if it were flipped around and said "not only worse than competing brokers, but worse than what is available on the market" because brokers typically provide retail traders better than what is available on the market (assuming: public exchanges = market).
I agree with GP that the press release suggests that Robinhood was not giving worse prices than NBBO, but was instead giving prices better than NBBO (like every broker), but intentionally not _as good_ prices as other brokers, in exchange for greater PFOF.
I am not fundamentally against PFOF, but the "honesty" required on the part of the broker in situations like this has always troubled me, and it's interesting to see it rear its head. I think an ideal market structure might keep PFOF, but in a more public way, such that payments were more transparent/competitive in real time, and not something arbitrarily negotiated between brokers and wholesalers.
Despite what many apologists claim about front running being this very specific and formal type of activity that never happens because it's illegal and no one involved in finance ever commits crimes, the reality is that front running is not a technical term, neither in law nor in any academic or formal financial treatment.
Front running is an informal term that is used in many different domains to refer to when a principal acting on behalf of a client uses privately obtained information gained from that client to benefit at the client's expense. The term is used in finance, it's used in real estate dealings, heck there was even a scandal involving domain name registrars front running their clients:
> the reality is that front running is not a technical term, neither in law nor in any academic or formal financial treatment.
There is literally a FINRA rule with with front running in the name (5270). It doesn't have to be a technical term for it to still have meaning (outside of Michael Lewis's intent to change its meaning). It specifically refers to a broker trading based on the knowledge of their client's intent to trade. The examples you give actually are instances of the true definition. It doesn't really happen in equities because of how automated and smooth that market is, but it certainly happens in other areas of finance.
That's not what they charged with. What they charged with:
- You trying to buy 100 shares for $100 each
- Someone is selling 100 shares for $98 each
- RH supposed to fill order at best price ($98)
- RH didn't do that.
This allows you to enjoy your hobbies without being bogged down by usual bureaucracy/pressure that you might deal with at work. So, continue working in tech (maybe reevaluate your role, amount of responsibility etc) and take music lessons, volunteer, join sport leagues, take pottery lessons etc.