51–60 of 165 posts
I know there was just a discussion yesterday on how amp is awful but it still is useful, e.g., to read WSJ articles. curl -o 1.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-quants-run-wall-street-now-1495389108 sed -n '/./{/ /,/ /p;}' 1.htm > 2.htm FWIW, 2.htm has no amp elements, no Javascript, no images, no ads, no externally sourced resources and therefore no tracking. Add links to non-essential images (cf. auto-loaded…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the modeling required to find arbitrage or alpha does Not really. Even if everyone is just throwing darts, half of the players will beat the market, and the more players you have the more extreme the outliers will be. Of course, the converse is also true, but no one pays attention to the losers. Both Vegas and Wall Street prosper from this same principle.
Virtu only lost money trading one day out of 1278 trading days between 2009 and 2014. In the most uncharitable analysis (1278/2; or the lost day happened in the middle), they had a 0.5^639 chance of doing that. Maybe you disagree with 0.5 per day. Let's make it 0.9! ...But that's still 5.7 x 10^-30. How many firms do we need to exist for this to emerge by chance? This and website bug bounties being sold on the black…
Lost money trading. If they made $1 trading that counted though I assure you that day was a loser from a business perspective. I also have not lost money trading in 3 years, simply by not trading at all.
It doesn't really detract from your broader point, which I don't have a strong opinion on but that stat is a pet peeve of mine as it's fairly meaningless.
Everyone can try to do it, but you need to spend the time and educate yourself like in any other profession or hobby and the first step is to go to eBay and search for historical stock market data, you can buy 20 years of data for less than $100 and you can test all trading ideas for free and without losing a single penny...the barrier for entry is very low, some Python knowledge + Linux machine and the data and off…
Everyone can try to do it, but you need to spend the time and educate yourself like in any other profession or hobby and the first step is to go to eBay and search for historical stock market data, you can buy 20 years of data for less than $100 and you can test all trading ideas for free and without losing a single penny...the barrier for entry is very low, some Python knowledge + Linux machine and the data and off…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditto. This is a tough situation. WSJ articles are generally high quality and probably worth paying for, but if there's an unbypassable paywall then there's no reason to feature it on HN. We could use it as a prompt. Maybe the comments could be a zone to talk about quants and wall street. That might be useful, but it'd have to be explicit. EDIT: I've actually wished for prompts on HN, for what it's worth. Other sites…
Regardless of its status on HN, I should consider subscribing. It looks like it's about $400/year for a digital subscription. A little over a dollar a day is very reasonable. And it looks like there are specials going on right now: $198/year for the first year; or $99 for six months; or $1 for two months. https://buy.wsj.com/wsjusmemorial17/ As for using the headline as a prompt for discussion, I'm quite sure that's…
1) my friends and I write to each other every day with more nuanced, researched, investigative journalism/analysis than the WSJ could ever hope to put out. I frequently release anonymous pastebins of my (hopefully impartial, unlike WSJ) analysis for free as a public service and I hope someone promotes them
2) the amount you quoted, $400, is somewhere around 1-2 months worth of total income for easily a billion people in this world. $400 would be considered an excellent monthly salary in a variety of countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Bosnia, Serbia, Albania, Ukraine.
So for likely the majority of the world, $400 would be almost unjustifiably high for words on a page that don't really offer any profitable or immediately actionable ideas
I know there was just a discussion yesterday on how amp is awful but it still is useful, e.g., to read WSJ articles. curl -o 1.htm https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/the-quants-run-wall-street-now-1495389108 sed -n '/./{/ /,/ /p;}' 1.htm > 2.htm FWIW, 2.htm has no amp elements, no Javascript, no images, no ads, no externally sourced resources and therefore no tracking. Add links to non-essential images (cf. auto-loaded…
How is this different from using 'links' or 'w3m'?
amp html pages look great in links.
Everyone can try to do it, but you need to spend the time and educate yourself like in any other profession or hobby and the first step is to go to eBay and search for historical stock market data, you can buy 20 years of data for less than $100 and you can test all trading ideas for free and without losing a single penny...the barrier for entry is very low, some Python knowledge + Linux machine and the data and off…
didn't know that you can buy historical stock market data on eBay. what search queries to enter?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the modeling required to find arbitrage or alpha does Not really. Even if everyone is just throwing darts, half of the players will beat the market, and the more players you have the more extreme the outliers will be. Of course, the converse is also true, but no one pays attention to the losers. Both Vegas and Wall Street prosper from this same principle.
Virtu only lost money trading one day out of 1278 trading days between 2009 and 2014. In the most uncharitable analysis (1278/2; or the lost day happened in the middle), they had a 0.5^639 chance of doing that. Maybe you disagree with 0.5 per day. Let's make it 0.9! ...But that's still 5.7 x 10^-30. How many firms do we need to exist for this to emerge by chance? This and website bug bounties being sold on the black…
Virtu are market makers. They aren't there to pick a direction or express a view or take any long term risk.
Gushing about their trading performance is like gushing about McDonalds... oh my god they buy buns and beef and lettuce every day and sell it at a profit!!! Well exactly, that's the business they are in. If a store isn't making money McDonalds would close it down. Virtu quote a bid and an offer in tens of thousands of securities. If they weren't getting enough flow in an instrument to cover their adverse selection costs + fees + fixed costs, they'd shut it down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtu only lost money trading one day out of 1278 trading days between 2009 and 2014. In the most uncharitable analysis (1278/2; or the lost day happened in the middle), they had a 0.5^639 chance of doing that. Maybe you disagree with 0.5 per day. Let's make it 0.9! ...But that's still 5.7 x 10^-30. How many firms do we need to exist for this to emerge by chance? This and website bug bounties being sold on the black…
> Virtu only lost money one day out of 1278 trading days Lost money trading . If they made $1 trading that counted though I assure you that day was a loser from a business perspective. I also have not lost money trading in 3 years, simply by not trading at all. It doesn't really detract from your broader point, which I don't have a strong opinion on but that stat is a pet peeve of mine as it's fairly meaningless.
Anyone have hard numbers on if/by how much quants outperform old fashioned techniques like flags and finding stocks that tend to go the opposite direction from the one you're interested in? I don't know the terminology for all this but I know there are limits due to uncertainty so even the best algorithms may not do much better that someone guessing. Do quants do 10% better, 2x better, 10x better? My Dad and I had a…