Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 195 posts

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#81

Post by linkmotif »

colordrops wrote: post #73
cwperkins wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually quite a lot of puzzle solving involved that makes it interesting. I think there are a lot of misconceptions of the industry at large and it suffers from bad PR after the global financial crisis. It's an interesting software problem to try and write algorithms that can earn alpha regardless of what is happening in the market. If anything computers have made our markets more efficient and it is great f…

See that's the thing. I don't know what "earning alpha" means and why I should care, and working on "price discovery", which is also something I am unaware of, sounds more like a punishment than a reward.

I wouldn’t close your mind to it. Finance attracts “questionable people” but finance is also very interesting on many levels and is a central part of life. Work through some finance math. Calculate an IRR. See how it works. If anything there’s a lot of great human history in it.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#82

Post by sulam »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #78
tomrod wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. I see C++, Java, and Python as the go-to languages with my wall-street programming and modeling acquaintances. Very little esoterica.

Jane Street's famous for its obsession with OCaml.

Honestly, OCaml is hardly esoteric. It's not a major language, but it's not a specialty language either. I'd put it in the same category as Elm, Erlang, or even something like Julia. Scala takes a ton of inspiration from OCaml, to the point where you pretty much feel like you know one if you know the other (at least speaking for myself that's been true).

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#83

Post by sulam »

colordrops wrote: post #73
cwperkins wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually quite a lot of puzzle solving involved that makes it interesting. I think there are a lot of misconceptions of the industry at large and it suffers from bad PR after the global financial crisis. It's an interesting software problem to try and write algorithms that can earn alpha regardless of what is happening in the market. If anything computers have made our markets more efficient and it is great f…

See that's the thing. I don't know what "earning alpha" means and why I should care, and working on "price discovery", which is also something I am unaware of, sounds more like a punishment than a reward.

alpha is a return in excess of what is expected. If you invest in a low cost index fund you expect alpha of 0 as compared to the index the fund is mirroring. If instead you put money in a hedge fund, alpha is the difference (positive or negative) between the returns the fund gets vs some benchmark like the S&P 500. Negative alpha is bad, positive alpha is good. Earning alpha means you are beating "the market".

There's also beta, which despite being the next greek letter, isn't the same at all! Beta is a measure of the price correlation between an asset and some benchmark in terms of volatility. Beta of 1 means that the asset moves in lockstep with the benchmark. Low beta means the asset doesn't move as much as the benchmark and high beta means the asset moves a lot compared to the benchmark. Tech IPOs are often high beta compared to the S&P 500.

Anyway, finance has a lot of intellectually challenging problems that happen to overlap well with people trained to build mathematical models that attempt to describe stochastic processes. CS, Physics, Stats, some branches of pure Mathematics -- all have direct applications in the work they do to some aspect of being able to understand and predict markets.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#84

Post by esh45y2345y »

haskellandchill wrote: post #70
colordrops wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

You’re comfortable enough to be ethical about your capital, for me it would be a big constraint. I’m sure I’ll get to be picky someday but that’s years from now. And at least there’s cool maths :)

Some make a whole lot less than you and still feel ill at ease working for the finance industry when it seems to soak up so much capital and contribute so little to society

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#85

Post by MathCompWiz »

colordrops wrote: post #64
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

Of course people like finance.

We are not all some hippies who want to help the world. Fuck this shit. I want straight cash! And if you think people at the top of the tech industry dont think like this ur just naive as fuck.

Whats not cool about a bot farming money? Its like the best thing ever looool.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#87

Post by consz »

colordrops wrote: post #64
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…

I apologize for the off the wall comment. Every time I read about wall street programming, I've got this subliminal voice in the back of my head wondering how anyone could find the motivation to do this work. I'm obviously revealing my biases against the financial industry here. Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause. Are there people out there who love…

As someone who works (hard) in the part of finance you're describing, it's a mix of a few things. From a purely intellectual standpoint, it's a very hard, very interesting quantitative/modeling problem to solve (ie. predict the price N seconds in the future is non-trivial). It's an extremely competitive field (you vs. other teams like you in the world competing for a slice of the pie), and you get results back from your experiments very quickly, so you know exactly where you stand. And finally, to your following point --

>Also, I'm unable to make myself do work if I don't see it contributing to some greater vision or cause

This simply is not something I experience. I've never felt any particular satisfaction from that particular aspect of a job, it's just something that never crosses my mind and incentive me in any way.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#88

Post by [deleted] »

otakucode wrote: post #57
ng12 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs Hands down my favorite part of working in finance. Better salary, no bullshit.

Regardless of what industry you are in, the closer you are to money, the more honestly you will be paid. This is why in many companies some of the best paid people (sometimes more than executives) are in sales. It is quite difficult to tell an employee that you can only manage a small raise if they can say "I brought in $15 million in business this year." If they have no discernible way to determine what they have ea…

[deleted]

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#89

Post by bm212 »

otakucode wrote: post #54
chollida1 wrote: post #2

I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…

Has offshoring ever been a significant factor in this arena? Given the profoundly proprietary nature of the systems being built, I would think that unlikely. Offshoring development is a good way to find your custom software reskinned and sold to a competitor without much legal recourse. Also, is 'mainstream' programming that common of a need? I had read (here on a HN comment thread) awhile ago that many organizations…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#90

Post by colordrops »

sulam wrote: post #83
colordrops wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See that's the thing. I don't know what "earning alpha" means and why I should care, and working on "price discovery", which is also something I am unaware of, sounds more like a punishment than a reward.

alpha is a return in excess of what is expected. If you invest in a low cost index fund you expect alpha of 0 as compared to the index the fund is mirroring. If instead you put money in a hedge fund, alpha is the difference (positive or negative) between the returns the fund gets vs some benchmark like the S&P 500. Negative alpha is bad, positive alpha is good. Earning alpha means you are beating "the market". There'…

Appreciate the explanation. Thank you.
Post reply on HN