Presumably from many of the same places GETCO's (significant) revenue comes from: by selling liquidity services. Market makers aren't a new concept.
I find financial tech fascinating, have had a lot of projects that involved attacking them (sometimes at a financial-domain level; ie, constructing technology-centric frontrunning schemes by leveraging software bugs), and so have had a chance to learn a bit about the field. Not as much as others on this thread.
I am defensive, it's true, but not about HFT (if exchanges adopted technical countermeasures to prohibit HFT, that'd actually be a win for me: one more thing for my team to test!) What bugs me is the knee-jerk comments, often from people with severely broken mental models of how trading markets work, piling on with "HFT flash-crashed the CDO meltdown" stuff.
The strategic and technical games that go on in the markets are engaging to watch, but they're basically ways of winning the most money (from the investor's/speculator's viewpoint). The more complex they get, and the higher the bid prices for talent which can win these games, the more the talent and energy is diverted from fields that could advance society more (say, basic research, or new product/tech development). So you get more smart kids going to biz school with an eye towards a place on Wall Street, instead of a broader distribution. That's my view on why financial jobs, and possibly large-scale investment, in general should be less profitable - though how to achieve that is a very open question (not sure how well capital gains taxes would work).
I find financial tech fascinating, have had a lot of projects that involved attacking them (sometimes at a financial-domain level; ie, constructing technology-centric frontrunning schemes by leveraging software bugs), and so have had a chance to learn a bit about the field. Not as much as others on this thread.
I am defensive, it's true, but not about HFT (if exchanges adopted technical countermeasures to prohibit HFT, that'd actually be a win for me: one more thing for my team to test!) What bugs me is the knee-jerk comments, often from people with severely broken mental models of how trading markets work, piling on with "HFT flash-crashed the CDO meltdown" stuff.