When I started working at the hedge fund I was hired by the forex group. It was run by a very smart trader, Bob G., a refugee from D.E. Shaw, when the fund was very small. He had a trader during the day that executed trades and an overnight trader that executed trades since it is a 24 hour market. Bob worked on the awk code that did all the calculations for the portfolio. I was hired by David B. who worked for the forex group and took care of the Unix boxes of all the trading groups.
My job was to write shell code to perform Unix admin jobs and C code to improve the trading model. I also had to write a program that would ring a bell at night to wake the night trader when she had to trade.
The portfolio model took the mean returns of all the possible instruments and their variances and tried to build a portfolio that would maximize the return with the smallest possible variance. No one likes a big variance in return. One program I worked on extended this to the skew and kurtosis of the currencies. I also wrote a program that got these different moments of the distributions from the option series for the currencies and bonds that we traded.
The traders called the banks to get the best prices for the currency contracts that the program told us to buy. We had Reuters to tell us what the market was at any time, but the trades were done over the phone.
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