HarmoniQ Insights

…should i take the call?

Good question.. pre-market data is hard to get right cuz it happens across multiple venues simultaneously, and each exchange has its own session hours, data feed, licensing requirements, etc. Most APIs either aggregate these imperfectly or rely on consolidated feeds that have minimal pre-market coverage by design. Databento sources direct feeds from each exchange. Pre-market data is available historically on our Standard plan, but for live pre-market data you'd need the appropriate license (regardless of which data provider you choose) and plan tier. The EQUS(.)MINI dataset specifically covers a subset of venues that have thin pre-market activity. For full coverage you'd want to aggregate the individual venue feeds directly. tldr: There's no single clean source due to fragmentation. Anyone claiming otherwise is either aggregating imperfectly or missing venues. Feel free to chat on our website if you have more questions.

“If Wall Street algorithms trade stocks in milliseconds, does the literal physical distance of a server to the stock exchange dictate who gets rich?” Michael Lewis would tell you “Yes,” but that’s an outdated answer. At some point it doesn’t make sense to play the speed game (e.g. digging holes through mountains to be 1us faster) because it’s just not scalable. There’s been a shift to AI/ML in the past decade, that’s why you rarely hear about HFT in the news anymore. But smarter strategies are slower by nature (complex things take longer to compute). The top quant firms are still really fast, but they’re not trying to be *the fastest* if that makes any sense. As in, they’re not playing purely a dumb speed game anymore. For more context, speed has always been a thing in trading, even before the markets were electronic. The Pony Express, the telegraph, etc. People hired faster runners to place trades before everyone else. Modern technology made things so close to the speed of light, to the point where being a microsecond faster just doesn’t yield the same ROI anymore. Thus the focus on smarter strategies. Also many of the fastest routes are commoditized today (vendor-owned). When I worked in HFT, the most unfair things I experienced were from brokers and lawyers and accountants. Not from access to speed (colocation). There’s a lot of misinformation on Reddit lol

i hated having "chubby cheeks" in my 20's, but today i am soooo grateful for keeping my buccal fat LOL

i had to take photos recently, and the photographer insisted on taking some at my piano

Holy crap. The Terminalist wrote about Databento.