I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
pathdependent.com
I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
1–10 of 118 posts
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#2An interesting post. I'd be interested hear what kind of background you've got.
I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship.
I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your background and what you know. If you think 'a random walk down Wall Street' is correct, it isn't. Have you seen the derivation of Black-Scholes? Do you know what most high frequency trading is based on?
I'd also be interested to see what type of stuff you like to read.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#3You can keep adding data points to your spline/polynomial interpolation, but that doesn't mean the model will be any better. In fact, for the purposes of predictive power, it will probably be worse.
I'm not extremely well educated on the subject, so somebody correct me, but these predictive models have always struck me as just complicated splines. Add a thousand data points, and the "predictions" for old datapoints look really good. The problem isn't with the math, it's with an inappropriate application of the math based either on fundamental misunderstanding of extrapolation or on a fundamental failing of human psychology in not realizing that the model was built on the data, and not the other way around.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#4negative findings (and publishing those results) are just as useful as positive findings.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#5The most important thing in your life is you and the brain you are carrying around in your head. If your experiences have made you smarter, you DO have something concrete to show for the years you've put in.
Entire countries have had everything destroyed, but have come back to be very successful. And this happened because of what they carry around in their heads.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#6If you're doing what you love, you've already won.
I feel a similar way pretty often. I have a couple of visions of software I want to build that are far out of my technical reach. I've been prototyping them, on and off, for about eight years too, depending how you count.
They've all failed. I start with a flash of optimism, and code until I realize I was wrong. I then stop, and rethink things until I think of another guess.
This is exactly how great accomplishments happen. You may be working on an impossible problem, or you may be working on a 20 year problem. Or maybe you're lucky and it's a 10 year problem.
But even if your goal is impossible, it's very likely that if you work on it for 20 years, you will solve a 20 year problem. It might be slightly askew to what you thought you were solving, but it will happen. It's almost inevitable.
Regardless, I wholly support what you're doing. Keep going. And read widely... explore... make sure you're playing in the margins of your field, and exploring odd projects far outside the scope of your work. It's those places that you will make that accidental discovery... that in all these years of trying to "beat the market" you made a fundamental discovery in artificial intelligence, or network theory, or whatever.
And yeah, if you're doing what you love, you've already won.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#7An interesting post. I'd be interested hear what kind of background you've got. I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship. I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your…
I didn't mean it in an insulting way. I'm actually starting a Masters/Ph.D. program in computational social sciences in the fall, hoping to fully immerse myself in an environment that also finds markets fascinating.
I have derived Black-Scholes; I study market micro-structure; I read as much as I can on anything related to social systems from volatility surfaces in options pricing to more generic machine learning methods such as PSO.
(I'd like to respond more, but I just noticed I am 20 minutes late for my fathers birthday party.)
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#8You can keep adding data points to your spline/polynomial interpolation, but that doesn't mean the model will be any better. In fact, for the purposes of predictive power, it will probably be worse. I'm not extremely well educated on the subject, so somebody correct me, but these predictive models have always struck me as just complicated splines. Add a thousand data points, and the "predictions" for old datapoints l…
Long-Term Capital Management always springs to my mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTCM
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#9I find it inspiring that he's stuck with it, and wonder how's he's made a living in the meantime
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#10You can keep adding data points to your spline/polynomial interpolation, but that doesn't mean the model will be any better. In fact, for the purposes of predictive power, it will probably be worse. I'm not extremely well educated on the subject, so somebody correct me, but these predictive models have always struck me as just complicated splines. Add a thousand data points, and the "predictions" for old datapoints l…
Taleb's empiricism implies resisting generalization from data and limiting the derivation of general rules from particular observations as one can be missing hidden properties. Thus he believes that scientists, economists, historians, policy makers, businessmen, and financiers are victims of an illusion of pattern. They overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of unexplainable randomness in those data. -- Wikipedia on Nassim Nicholas Taleb
People project patterns onto data when in fact, they don't exists.