<i>Because there&#x27;s such a vast amount of prerequisite knowledge required for analysis, one either has to slog through the learning curve or look for expert opinions.</i><p>Thomas, Erin, and I possess voluminous experimental evidence that suggests generalist engineers can know more about market making than Michael Lewis (and, if one assumes Lewis is not committing malpractice with regards to framing quotes, Brad Katsuyama) in under two hours.<p>This is not a commandingly high bar.  An order book is just a data structure.  It tends to have a lot of money associated with it, but that is also true of at least some hash tables, and you understand hash tables.<p>I am frustrated with HN discussion of HFT occasionally for the same reason I get frustrated with HN discussions of some privacy technologies: there exists a political valence to the discussion and some participants treat that political valence as carte blanche for just ignoring that we are talking about actual codebases which have actual rules which can be described in words, including words which definitively falsify some claims about them which feel right to people due to political valence.