The 13-Cent Quant: Deconstructing an LLM’s Internal Monologue on Building a Low-Latency HFT Engine

How a cheap LLM reasoning run designed a cache-aligned, lock-free C++ trading skeleton—and the systems engineering blueprint to take it to production.

The 13-Cent Quant: Deconstructing an LLM’s Internal Monologue on Building a Low-Latency HFT Engine

In the world of quantitative finance, low latency is measured in nanoseconds, and the infrastructure required to capture it typically costs millions of dollars in specialized hardware, fiber-optic routes, and elite systems engineering talent.

Yet, for exactl…