Blue Trading System’s is a family of traders, technologists, innovators and committed professionals. The women and men that work here want to build something that not only meets demand but advances the industry. We are sharp, loyal and strategic.
Through 2018, we wanted to highlight the people behind the name. These are the ones applying their knowledge, dedicating their time and investing their money in Blue Trading Systems. We invite you to learn more about the people building our solutions.
- What is your name, title and responsibilities at Blue Trading Systems?
- My name is Eric Harding and I’m one of the non-managing partners. Day to day I have my hands in a lot of different pots. I own the market data pipeline that receives data from the exchanges and I’m also heavily involved in the management of our User Interface.
- How did you get into this field of derivatives trading? Trader or technologist?
- I’m definitely a technologist. I’m originally from the east coast but was working at Microsoft in Washington state when my wife and I decided to move to Chapel Hill. I interviewed with the guys that were then Blue Capital and really liked the team and the problems they were solving, so we came over in 2010. BTS spun out of Blue Capital Group about six months later.
- From your perspective, can you describe the relationship between BTS and its clients?
- BTS has a very close relationship with it’s clients. In a larger company you end up being several levels removed from your customers. However, due to our size and our culture we work directly with Support and with our customers every day. We aren’t insulated so when our customers feel pain we feel it too. It has a major impact on how we prioritize our development.
- How has BTS evolved since you started at the company?
- Incrementally. There haven’t been any huge changes but we’re always evaluating how we operate, and tweaking things to improve our effectiveness and efficiency. This applies to things like engineering and project management as well as how we support our customers.
- What are a few challenges the industry is currently facing?
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With the slowing of increased CPU speed and Moore’s Law drawing to a close, the race for speed is going to get very interesting. Moving from easily mutable and inspectable software systems to more opaque hardware solutions like FPGA is going to come with some interesting challenges.
I also think that blockchains/cryptocurrencies are going to be a very interesting space to watch in the next few years. It’s almost a collision between the Silicon Valley way and the established way. Need to co-locate near GDAX? Sure, it’s in the cloud just spin up an AWS instance.
- What is your favorite piece of advice regarding trading, technology, the markets, leadership?
- It’s easy to find a complex solution to a problem but it’s usually worthwhile to keep looking until you find a solution that is simpler. Once you’ve found that it will feel obvious.
- If you had to pick, what animal would you be and why?
- Octopus. Who could say no to 6 more arms?
