High-frequency trading in Zurich / Geneva

What is the high-frequency trading market like in Zurich / Geneva?

Zurich / Geneva is a secondary centre for high-frequency trading, with demand concentrated in a smaller set of desks. High-frequency trading captures very short-lived pricing edges by being faster than competitors to observe and act. The edge is largely engineering: network path, kernel bypass, and increasingly FPGA implementation of the decision hot path. Typical holding horizon is microseconds to seconds, hiring concentrates on hft / low-latency engineer, quant trader, quant researcher, and 2 of the firms we track run a Zurich / Geneva desk. Pay sits at roughly 90% of the New York benchmark for the equivalent role and seniority, quoted in CHF.