61–70 of 90 posts
I don't think many people realize the flexibility of Google Sheets + Scripts. When I need an ad-hoc flexible internal tool, Google sheets is usually the first place I start building.
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Alpaca.markets is great! What are other alternative for personal solution?
Have you looked at Interactive Brokers? They seem to support more complex order types than Alpaca, which can meaningfully impact returns of a automated trading strategy.
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Also worked for some large financial firms, and can confirm that there is a disconnect between Excel models created by traders and IT. One interesting development was the acquisition of ClearFactr by Goldman [1]. Seems like they hope it will centralize some of these models into one sytem, making them accessible across the firm (Excel sheets can even be imported). GS has had a centralized risk/pricing system for over…
I worked at a financial services company that created portfolio analytics software. My job pretty much consisted of turning our analysts' excel models into high performance Scala code. The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their job…
Giving up that control is hard.
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Also worked for some large financial firms, and can confirm that there is a disconnect between Excel models created by traders and IT. One interesting development was the acquisition of ClearFactr by Goldman [1]. Seems like they hope it will centralize some of these models into one sytem, making them accessible across the firm (Excel sheets can even be imported). GS has had a centralized risk/pricing system for over…
I worked at a financial services company that created portfolio analytics software. My job pretty much consisted of turning our analysts' excel models into high performance Scala code. The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their job…
Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.
Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.
As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.
After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.
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Which is a nice way of saying you're in a pool of bait for high frequency traders. ...but that's really not so bad. Having an algorithm skim 2 cents/share off of you is a lot better than paying $5+ per trade (assuming you're not trading 1000s of shares, and you're not in penny stocks or options where spreads are big).
It's not a nice way of saying that, the "pool of bait" logic is totally wrong. There's a lot of nonsense written about high frequency trading on the internet, but for example Matt Levine's explanations are completely readable, correct, and on point (see the other comment).
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Also worked for some large financial firms, and can confirm that there is a disconnect between Excel models created by traders and IT. One interesting development was the acquisition of ClearFactr by Goldman [1]. Seems like they hope it will centralize some of these models into one sytem, making them accessible across the firm (Excel sheets can even be imported). GS has had a centralized risk/pricing system for over…
I worked at a financial services company that created portfolio analytics software. My job pretty much consisted of turning our analysts' excel models into high performance Scala code. The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their job…
One cyber-breach and all that really nice clean code is readily understandable to your competitors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at a financial services company that created portfolio analytics software. My job pretty much consisted of turning our analysts' excel models into high performance Scala code. The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their job…
> My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows. Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail. Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed. As an aside, an alternative interpretation…
Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)
Does something like this exist in Europe? Free trading would be a dream. Paying 7,5 EUR to 15 EUR or more for each transaction gets old quick. Free : Or paying a very little amount compared with what is considered the norm.
https://KloudTrader.com/Narwhal
Our brokerage is through Tradier.
I worked for one of the largest financials services companies in the world and they STILL use excel to drive their trading activities. They are so large and so complex that it's impossible to convert them because no one completely understands how it all works. They were developed by traders/market experts with no help from IT, for years IT didn't even knew they existed. These spreadsheets are truly amazing, I've only…