20 years ago my first job out of college was with a small company doing combinatorial auctions for the institutional bond market (among other industries). In the end the chicken/egg problem of having enough liquidity was too much to overcome.
At one point we pitched the NYSE on doing the opening call as a combinatorial auction but they were not interested.
We did have some success in pollution credit and trucking logistics markets though.
Of all the jobs I've had, that was easily the most fun/interesting algorithmically. I got to learn all about LP/MIP solvers, graph decomposition, distributed computation, etc.
Thanks! We found that the "UX" aspect of fitting squarely into existing workflows to disrupt without disrupting is key—as is how we message the product. Both our focus on solving speed and Expressive Bids as code are "UX" decisions aimed at slotting us into existing market structure and mind space.
A surprising (to us) takeaway was that making a product in this space sound "vanilla"/undifferentiated is a good thing. Once folks aren't concerned about an initial integration being a lift, they're happy to onboard us as "just another trading venue" (but with great story about unique liquidity and match quality). Many then get excited about adopting the lowest hanging fruit incrementally for their specific use cases. And after peeling away a few layers of the onion, they get excited about the future state in which others do the same, and what initially seems like incremental change becomes a market structure transformation.
We studied the history of adoption in other markets where it's gone well (FCC spectrum, display advertising, procurement) and poorly (OptiMark, POSIT4—great attempts, ahead of their time, killed by complexity and subtle mismatches between the mechanism and market participant needs).
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Really cool!
20 years ago my first job out of college was with a small company doing combinatorial auctions for the institutional bond market (among other industries). In the end the chicken/egg problem of having enough liquidity was too much to overcome.
At one point we pitched the NYSE on doing the opening call as a combinatorial auction but they were not interested.
We did have some success in pollution credit and trucking logistics markets though.
Of all the jobs I've had, that was easily the most fun/interesting algorithmically. I got to learn all about LP/MIP solvers, graph decomposition, distributed computation, etc.
Best of luck to you!
Thanks! We found that the "UX" aspect of fitting squarely into existing workflows to disrupt without disrupting is key—as is how we message the product. Both our focus on solving speed and Expressive Bids as code are "UX" decisions aimed at slotting us into existing market structure and mind space.
A surprising (to us) takeaway was that making a product in this space sound "vanilla"/undifferentiated is a good thing. Once folks aren't concerned about an initial integration being a lift, they're happy to onboard us as "just another trading venue" (but with great story about unique liquidity and match quality). Many then get excited about adopting the lowest hanging fruit incrementally for their specific use cases. And after peeling away a few layers of the onion, they get excited about the future state in which others do the same, and what initially seems like incremental change becomes a market structure transformation.
We studied the history of adoption in other markets where it's gone well (FCC spectrum, display advertising, procurement) and poorly (OptiMark, POSIT4—great attempts, ahead of their time, killed by complexity and subtle mismatches between the mechanism and market participant needs).