Market making seems very dull to me, is calling it HFT just a rebrand? What do these people do all day? Make a penny all day on each trade flipping the bid offer spread? There can't be much intellectual sophistication in such a business...
I have recruiters coming to me with a lot of offers in both these areas (econometrics background). Is there any novel or interesting research done here or is it more programming and extremely boring "trading" with little risk?I've done both.
Is it for a hybrid trader programmer position?
I don't think you can actually get those jobs without passing an IQ test. On the trading side
Some of the jobs seem like there would be quite a lot of programming. Not the real low-level machine stuff but analyzing the trades and working on their "logic" (what does this even look like at such high speeds? just be the best bid/offer at all times and do it really fast? in the economic literature, a market maker just needs to do this and control his risk to make money...). I guess I don't get what use an econometric researcher is to this type of business? Just buy the fastest computers and equipment to do this simple trade or arbitrages. I hardly even consider this trading because it is almost riskless in the financial sense. Boring.
I've heard some companies do more like price prediction where there are a lot of researchers and it depends less on speed. Are these the same thing still? Most of the companies I hear of who do this still get called "HFT" in the media. Is that more like a quant fund at higher speeds?