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

bloomberg.com

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

#121

Post by bubbleRefuge »

aaronchall wrote: post #114
praulv wrote: post #102

Counter view: I only work in the field because it's the only way in tech to pay rent where I live. I actually hate it, it's of zero value to society and frankly the trading/business side are real assholes under pressure

> zero value to society What value are financial services? Do you - have a bank account? checking? savings? money markets? - monitor your accounts online? do transfers? - have an investment account? save for retirement? - have life or disability insurance? pool risks and hedge against them? - have a city or country that needs to raise money, borrow from others? - have a company that needs to issue stock for capital i…

The size of the financial sector swelled to about 9% of GDP in 2010 from around 5% in in 1980. Perhaps that is what the thread was referring to. Nearly doubling in size when finance doesn't produce anything real. They are a middleman. Would certainly like to see nationalization of large parts of finance such as simple checking accounts, insurance, and the big one, lets double down on Social security so that people can have dignified retirements regardless of what their work was. We dont need a big financial sector to have a great economy; Its a brain drain. Smart people should be working on real world problems like diseases, automation, efficient cheaper construction, environmental remediation, etc. that improve the standard of living for society.

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

#122

Post by dreamdu5t »

jabretti wrote: post #61
blunte wrote: post #49

Step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to just making money.

Yes, but step back and consider the immense intellect and creativity being devoted to getting laid, or speculating about what's going to happen on Game of Thrones, or thinking up clever things you should have said half an hour ago, or complaining about what's wrong with Star Wars these days. Or arguing on the internet. Just a teeny portion of our species' intellectual output winds up creating or discovering anything…

Supermarkets were full of food and lights were on before hedge funds and prop shops existed. The first supermarkets weren’t even financed by wall street but a real estate tycoon with his own money.

Wall Street is a welfare program for traders, underwritten by the taxpayers and paying for the financial sector’s total losses in 1929, 1973 and 2008.

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

#123

Post by throwaway_hft »

rch wrote: post #12
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I've seen claims of $1M base salaries in NYC, and seven figure bonuses are certainly possible (in HFT). $300K+ (incl. bonus) is no problem, but ML is less of a factor than FPGA and C++ experience.

I work in prop trading and I've never seen that kind of guaranteed salary offered. Maybe as a one time signing bonus to poach someone from a competitor. Typical base salaries for traders/quants/engineers are in the low six figures.

I'm head of a small team running high frequency strategies. I control parameters/portfolio/risk, design/fit predictive models, code C++ for simulation and live trading, and spec out designs for our FPGA developers. I make around 200 base with average bonus in the high 6 figures, good years over a million. At firms with uncapped contractural payouts, bonuses can be far higher for very profitable traders.

But if you come into the industry expecting that, prepare for disappointment. The markets are super efficient so it's hard to make profits. A lot of good ideas are done to death already. You might be stuck on a bad team or not get the opportunity to advance. Making mid 6 figures all-in on a consistently profitable team at a profitable diversified firm is a very good outcome. Modal outcome is making low 6 figures for a couple years and being pushed out.

Also while some enlightened firms realize that infrastructure is a competitive edge and pay big bonuses to engineers, there are many where they're second-class citizens. Only take front-office roles at such firms, not just because of the money, but because you won't be respected. IMO they should be avoided entirely because they'll eventually fall behind and lose.

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

#124

Post by cm2187 »

scrumper wrote: post #113
cm2187 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems strange to me that you would want someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the nature of the problem (or the solution) to be designing and building the tool, just because they claim to be good tool-makers. I couldn't agree more and this is my main objection to "AI will replace [insert any job here]". A lot of problems are inaccessible to programmers just because not enough of them seem to be willi…

Re your AI thesis, I think it’s the exact opposite. Deterministic, rule-based processing applied to lots of similar data are perfect for AI-fication. It’s all in the computer, and you can kick out to a human-driven exception process when required. All that physical, real-world stuff you mentioned (cleaning, cooking etc) is vastly more complicated, riddled with experience-driven subjective judgements (is this paper on…

Most of the complex accounting and legal questions that these departments are doing manually aren't completely trivial either (we are not talking about just adding assets). But the determination of whether the paper on the floor is trash or not is something that pretty much any AI professional can apply his mind on (and will likely do given the size of the market), whereas very few will apply their mind on how IFRS should treat a tax asset in consolidation when the corresponding tax treatment under USGAAP is a still in discussion.

If you look at self driving cars, they are already doing the sort of wizardry of your trash example when analysing the other objects in sight.

And again it's not so much a matter of technical complexity, it's a matter of the domain being inaccessible to those who can best automate it.

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

#125

Post by monkeyshelli »

odonnellryan wrote: post #62
meesterdude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, i am working on building a cryptocurrency trading platform, because the API's are easily accessible - but the markets entirely different in behavior. Still, rolling my own implementations of technical indicators has been pretty insightful, and backtesting has shown whats worked and what hasn't in given market conditions. but i realize you're probably talking about more traditional markets like FOREX

What are you using to backtest? Data you gathered yourself? Hardest part with backtesting in my experience has been trying to simulate successful buy/sell orders and the fees.

You can query Bittrex for some data, or you can find some data and a script from here https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/tree/master/freqtrade/tes...

Couldn't you bake the fee into the application logic e.g. https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/blob/master/freqtrade/mai...

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

#126

Post by mac01021 »

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…

Doesn't this sentiment preclude you from almost every programming job?

It's almost always going to be about finding the optimal way to funnel money toward whoever is in control of your employer.

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

#127

Post by meesterdude »

odonnellryan wrote: post #62
meesterdude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, i am working on building a cryptocurrency trading platform, because the API's are easily accessible - but the markets entirely different in behavior. Still, rolling my own implementations of technical indicators has been pretty insightful, and backtesting has shown whats worked and what hasn't in given market conditions. but i realize you're probably talking about more traditional markets like FOREX

What are you using to backtest? Data you gathered yourself? Hardest part with backtesting in my experience has been trying to simulate successful buy/sell orders and the fees.

poloniex has historical data you can use. I trade on bittrex, but their data doesn't go back very far - enough to do calculations in the now, but not nearly enough to backtest against.

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

#128

Post by meesterdude »

monkeyshelli wrote: post #125
odonnellryan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using to backtest? Data you gathered yourself? Hardest part with backtesting in my experience has been trying to simulate successful buy/sell orders and the fees.

You can query Bittrex for some data, or you can find some data and a script from here https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/tree/master/freqtrade/tes... Couldn't you bake the fee into the application logic e.g. https://github.com/gcarq/freqtrade/blob/master/freqtrade/mai...

> Couldn't you bake the fee into the application logic

You can (and I do as well) - although some proprietary bots have had notable problems with figuring them out.

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

#129

Post by kgwgk »

blunte wrote: post #99
mertd wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same could be said for "just finding cat videos."

Hardly. How many people, MIT grads, for example, spend 10 hours of paid work day "just finding cat videos"?

Say “getting people to click on ads” if you like it better. In the end it’s just making money as well. I guess working at a loss making company can be much more satifactory from a moral point of view but it’s not sustainable...

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

#130

Post by alexcnwy »

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…

To be fair, quant vs. programmer is a false dichotomy since most quants did degrees like mathematical finance, actuarial science, etc. where computer science and numerical programming courses are part of their degrees.
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