‘Q Tips’ Offers Practical Guidance and Tips for Financial Big Data Analytics

Palo Alto, CA (25 Mar 2015) – KX Systems, a leader in high-performance database and time-series analytics, today announced the publication of “Q Tips: Fast, Scalable and Maintainable Kdb+” by Nick Psaris, the new book for programmers immersed in analyzing Big Data in financial services.

Q is the expressive query and programming language built into kdb+, the high-performance database from KX Systems. For 22 years, some of the world’s largest trading organizations have used q and kdb+ to perform complex data analytics and support their trading activity.

“Q Tips” provides the growing q programming community with a practical guide to learning the language through building a real life application. Filled with useful examples and in-depth explanations, “Q Tips” has something for everyone who wants to understand q, write more efficient code, or start developing their own complex event processing engine. The book is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle versions.

Charles G. Skelton, CTO at KX Systems, commented: “In this book, Nick calls upon his years of hands-on experience of using q in real world trading environments. He introduces the building blocks of kdb+ and demonstrates how to capture, persist and analyze huge data sets efficiently. This is essential reading for any programmer working with q and we’re sure it will be a welcomed and widely read resource.”

Nick has developed automated trading systems for over 15 years. He began his career at Morgan Stanley in New York before moving to Hong Kong where he built an equity portfolio trading and back-testing system in q. He also spent three years at Liquid Capital Markets Hong Kong, building a high frequency automated market making system in q. Currently, he is building an inventory optimization platform in q at a top tier American investment bank.

Nick added: “I found myself answering the same questions and seeing the same design mistakes from other q developers so I decided to do something about it. I’ve worked with q for nearly a decade so I’ve seen what works well and I want to share that insight with the wider community. My hope is that this book helps others to realize q’s huge potential.”

Nick graduated from Duke University with a degree in Physics and Chinese. He is a CFA Charterholder and obtained a Masters in Computational Finance from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.