I know a software engineer who worked for one of the big quant firms in the north east (forgot the name...it's big) before people even knew what quants were.
He worked for them till he got out on his own. All his backtracking software is written by him and is in C (nice GUI, graphing feature, etc). He uses it to find his edge.
His trading platform is Excel...Obviously he doesn't do HFT...his trades are measured in days.
I know - 1 data point, but if a software engineer who is better than me in both trading & coding is using Excel, I'm not going to knock it.
He worked for them till he got out on his own. All his backtracking software is written by him and is in C (nice GUI, graphing feature, etc). He uses it to find his edge.
His trading platform is Excel...Obviously he doesn't do HFT...his trades are measured in days.
I know - 1 data point, but if a software engineer who is better than me in both trading & coding is using Excel, I'm not going to knock it.