How is this new? The first time I setup my own linux server was at my parent's house, so I could write a crawler to collect market data in the hopes of applying some AI technique for market predictions. This was 10 years ago. It's a lot of programmers dream to write a little program that can print money. Afterwards I went and worked on wallstreet, and realized how foolish this was.
If you learn something while writing it, and it sits and earns a little bit of money without much work, then it's not really foolish. I bet you learned more doing that project, things that probably helped get you that Wall Street job, than you seem to estimate now.
Sure there's always value in doing. What I believe is foolish after learning more about what the industry does is the belief that a DIY program can actually make money.
Not quite -- even if you match the market or slightly under-perform the market, it might still make sense if you achieve these results with lesser volatility and more consistent earnings. I do not necessarily want to beat a market which returns 7% on average but loses 40% every 6 years...
Yes, it's foolish for most people. But again, there still are some BYO everything HTF outfits, where essentially one man teams still do well - they do get co-loc and feeds usually though.
And there are some that can pull it off at home, algo trading slower time scales, but they are usually programming geniuses.
