Sure, you can get the point where you're placing trades for a couple hundred grand... as long as a lot of things fall into place for you. Writing your own apps

Sure, you can get the point where you're placing trades for a couple hundred grand... as long as a lot of things fall into place for you. Writing your own apps? Unless you think you can get talent that is willing to roll the dice and possibly be out of a job in a couple months, you're looking at 12 months x the cost of those people... how much is that? $500k? This isn't framework-style assembly of components. If you want to be competitive, the SLOWEST things you can use are linux and C++. Colocation agreements usually require a minimum commitment of 12-36 months... probably $10k/mo if you have some rudimentary failover and the like. I'd say anyone who tries with less than 12 months and $500k to truly burn has 0 shot at success. And if you want to really do it right, you're looking at an order of magnitude more.