"Elite 27-year-olds in high-frequency trading used to make $5m a year... not anymore."

I've spent years working for major high-frequency trading firms (HFTs). The opportunity that used to be there for elite talent in their 20s has ceased to exist. I joined the industry around the pandemic; even then, very few people knew about HFTs unless they were studying Math at a top school. Now, it's out in the open and everyone knows about them... including regulators. 

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The people that joined HFT around 2014 were the people that made the real money. I know colleagues who joined these firms at the age of 22 and, by 2019, they were making $5 million per year. It's no longer that lucrative.

As a high-frequency trader, your job is to figure out exactly how an exchange works, but there are only so many exchanges and a growing number of HFTs. If you leave your firm for another with similar or better infrastructure, you can rewrite your strategy in a couple of weeks and, whatever money that strategy was making, half of it will come to you. As more people move firms, these strategies get less and less lucrative. 

There are a lot of very smart young people going into HFT today or already working in it, but that's going to change, especially as they get regulated. It happened before with investment banks, which used to be very prestigious in the 80s and 90s, but less so today. I don't know what the next opportunity will be for those students to earn $5m a year in their 20s, but it's probably at some firm that's currently lurking in the shadows.

Aarav Kail is a pseudonym.

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