I'm the odd one out. I've been writing automated trading software since 2007 as a hobby. However, I'm not looking for a job doing that. 1) It's profitable enough to do it on my own. 2) I have a gig right now doing time series analysis for a company that isn't financial, which imho is just as fun (if not more), but has a bit more potential to benefit the world. 3) When I get a job doing a hobby it has the potential to burn that hobby out. It's not about making money, but enjoying life, and being a bit competitive is fun.
Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#22I just made a visualization tool recently. scatterstocks.com
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Experiencing the same thing on Firefox 60 running on XUbuntu
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#23At one on the previous jobs I wrote a tool which takes a list of bonds/equities trades and ties buys and sells in order to count PnL. The idea was any sell should be connected with one or several buys/repos. Like, I sell 100 bonds , so I should take them from 5 buys in correct order (FIFO). It seems easy to do this but there are tricky operations like REPOs when you have to 'borrow' papers from a reversal REPO to per…
I also had a previous job doing exactly that... but it was an billing / accounting system at a print company.
Certain large customers (a bank, an airline) had contracts where they would order large batches of printed forms, luggage tickets, sick bags, etc, at some negotiated quantity / price (taking into account the size of the print run, our capacity at the time, etc.). We (the print company) would then print it and warehouse it, and ship it directly to their individual locations in smaller batches as they ordered it.
The billing was done on some cost + shipping basis, so at the end of the month you'd have to look at everything that was shipped, work out which original batches going into inventory that came from on a FIFO basis, and then use that as a basis for the cost plus billing.
It was a horrible messy old codebase, and it was sometimes difficult to explain the results.
Anyway, I just thought I'd share this as an example use-case for a sufficiently generic / flexible / reliable implementation of your potential side project.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#24Quantlib api as a hobby: https://quantra.io
Backtester by author of quantstart: https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#25I'm the odd one out. I've been writing automated trading software since 2007 as a hobby. However, I'm not looking for a job doing that. 1) It's profitable enough to do it on my own. 2) I have a gig right now doing time series analysis for a company that isn't financial, which imho is just as fun (if not more), but has a bit more potential to benefit the world. 3) When I get a job doing a hobby it has the potential to…
PhD in signal processing, amateur algo trader & economist and software engineer by day (not in the finance field unfortunately). I want to live your life!
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#26I made some resource management tools that helped me in MMORPG's (ex EVE, WOW) and they had potential for real-life usage. There was also a episode in my life where i tried to predict random using simple neural nets in roulette, lottery and some stock markets. Fun thing to do but time-consuming.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#27I made some resource management tools that helped me in MMORPG's (ex EVE, WOW) and they had potential for real-life usage. There was also a episode in my life where i tried to predict random using simple neural nets in roulette, lottery and some stock markets. Fun thing to do but time-consuming.
Both of these sound incredible cool, is there a Git repo to check out or something?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#28A bit different from what most financial engineers are interested in, but I'm in the process of developing a linear programming model for the US tax code so you can do long term tax optimizations based on your financial profile and goals. It was a lot harder than I anticipated but got a PoC working recently. Ugly landing page at https://smarterpath.co
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#29I'm the odd one out. I've been writing automated trading software since 2007 as a hobby. However, I'm not looking for a job doing that. 1) It's profitable enough to do it on my own. 2) I have a gig right now doing time series analysis for a company that isn't financial, which imho is just as fun (if not more), but has a bit more potential to benefit the world. 3) When I get a job doing a hobby it has the potential to…
What platform do you trade on? Do you use a broker or trade directly on an exchange?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone designs financial engineering tools as a hobby?
#30A bit different from what most financial engineers are interested in, but I'm in the process of developing a linear programming model for the US tax code so you can do long term tax optimizations based on your financial profile and goals. It was a lot harder than I anticipated but got a PoC working recently. Ugly landing page at https://smarterpath.co
Signed up! Your site doesn't look that bad - I actually like the layout. If you don't mind sharing, what did you use to create the landing page?