Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#61

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:44 AM UTC

joshkaufman wrote: post #3

This is exactly what I did with business, instead of getting an MBA or a PhD. Here's my reading list: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/ Here's the book I wrote, condensing what I learned in the process: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843529/ I now own my own business, work for myself as a business teacher and consultant, have an enormous amount of flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, and make more t…

Isn't there a limited amount of room for people to do what you did? I mean there can only be so many teachers and business consultants.

To my mind part of being an entrepreneur is leaving the world of books, professors, and ideas.

Anyway congratulations and here's to hoping that your book makes the B-school reading lists.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#62

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:46 AM UTC

dagw wrote: post #23

bosie wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thousands? if your average book has 300 pages, and you read 30 pages per hour, you would need to read for 10000 hours, doing it for 8 hours a day you need 1250 days. that's without repeating anything of course. am i wrong? in what timespan did you read those thousands of books?

I'm not the original poster, but I've found that most 300 page business books contain 10-20 pages of useful info and 280-290 pages of fluff and filler. I generally skim through the average business book in an hour or 2, including the time to make notes of all the potentially useful advice I find. It's rare to find a business book worth carefully reading cover to cover.

That's a great point and unfortunately it does not work that way with math books.

Well, fortunately in that the signal-to-noise ratio is high. Unfortunately in that one must be very selective about what one chooses to invest time into reading.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#63

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:48 AM UTC

joshkaufman wrote: post #50

nightski wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, and you actually find these books valuable? Any book I read that I truly learn something from usually takes weeks or months to get through. Call me slow but it just takes time for real information to sink in for me. Sure I understand the words, but to fully absorb the knowledge takes time. Reading 200-400 books a year - how do you ever get the chance to absorb any of that information? If you can really learn val…

Business texts and technical books are very different. I read math/science/programming books as well - I'm currently working through Probability Theory: The Logic of Science by E.T. Jaynes. There's no way I could grok that book in 20 minutes. 10-20 minutes won't cut it for deep technical material, particularly if the book is designed to teach via working through examples. If you're reading a workbook, then take the t…

On the other hand, the more you get used to reading math, the more possible it becomes for your eye to skim through math stuff.

I'm at the point where I can sometimes skim through arXiv papers and understand the gist.

(Does it work the same for books with code in them? Legit coders can skim and understand?)

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#64

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:48 AM UTC

monk_the_dog wrote: post #8

joshkaufman wrote: post #3

This is exactly what I did with business, instead of getting an MBA or a PhD. Here's my reading list: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/ Here's the book I wrote, condensing what I learned in the process: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843529/ I now own my own business, work for myself as a business teacher and consultant, have an enormous amount of flexibility in my day-to-day schedule, and make more t…

Nice list. One quibble: I'd put Steve Blank's "Four Steps" under Entrepreneurship rather than "Value Creation and Design". I've read Four Steps, Universal Principals of Design, and Design of Everyday things (I have not read Rework, the other book in the category). Four Steps really covers much different material than the other other two books.

Rework is probably the best out of all of those!

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#65

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:50 AM UTC

jteo wrote: post #17

You go and get a Masters because of 2 reasons 1. Signalling to your future employer / Getting past the HR filter. 2. Networking with others. Learning something useful is usually a bonus.

I would like to hear much more discussion about these two parts of it.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#66

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 9:58 AM UTC

choffstein wrote: post #42

Well, since I have a Masters in Financian Engineering (well, technically, a Masters in Computational Finance -- but same difference), I feel like I at least have to comment on a few things. 1. Just because the material is freely available on the internet does not mean you will have the ability to learn from that material. However, an inability to learn the material does not necessarily indicate a disinterest or an in…

Thanks for the relevant comments.

I addressed #1 in the article. Suffice to say I disagree.

#2 Who says you interact deeply with material in school?

#3 comes from Emanuel Derman's interviews of fresh grads.

#4 I do understand the difference but I would rather prop trade than make markets.

#5 There are so many sub-areas. Should you study wavelets? Finite element method? Differential geometry? EDA? Bayes? ML?

#6 Perhaps I am more risk-averse than you. Or less trusting.

#2, #7 - I said that's the irreproducible part of an MFE.

Would you mind adding your comments to the Disqus on the site? They're very thorough and as you're an MFE grad they counterbalance what I said. I think your viewpoint is quite valuable.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#67

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 10:00 AM UTC

verysimple wrote: post #2

We live in the so called information age and everyday someone posts something like this on the web. Some road map to better educate yourself cheaper in x or y field. Ironically, governments throughout the world still struggle to find solutions to education. Please, just teach people to open a book and do some damage.

Check out BBC Business Daily's currently running series about internet use in the developing world.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#68

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 10:00 AM UTC

chrisaycock wrote: post #46

> It was hard enough to make you feel smart for knowing that the third moment of a distribution is its skewness... If you think that makes you smart, then I want you to be my competitor.

Read on, the next clause indicates that I don't think it makes you smart.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#69

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 10:02 AM UTC

localhost3000 wrote: post #18

wondering how you compete with the MFEs from MIT / Harvard / Yale / [other top school] for that BSD quant job when on your resume it says "I read a lot of free shit on the internet" ? you don't pay $100k for the knowledge, you pay $100k for a ticket to the party. everyone knows that. of course, if you want to be an entrepreneur or trade your own $, that is a different story. but this seems unrealistic for any kind of…

Great point, I have experienced exactly this problem.

It's actually the reason I started writing on the internet (note the extremely clever site name).

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#70

Post by crasshopper » Sun, Jan 23, 2011, 10:20 AM UTC

goblgobl wrote: post #31

I'm deciding between MFE/MS programs and starting independently at the moment. Here's what I've sort of cobbled together. My understanding is that your value to a firm is directly proportional to your ability to generate alpha. Credentials would be useful for securing an entry-level position, but eventually, it is your ability to develop profitable strategies that will secure your position in this industry. This is s…

Ultimately yes, just like any business what you add to the bottom line is the brick-hard determinant of wage.

But just like in other businesses, perceptions, measurability, and org structure are very important.

It's not as simple as "can you generate alpha". Does your desk manager give you as much leeway as you desire? Does your alpha come only after your position has been underwater for weeks and you were given position to double down?

Measurement is also a huge issue. How much did you contribute to the bottom line? Can you prove it? What if you told Moira about low-discrepancy sequences, which improved her Monte Carlo sims, which somehow affected someone's trading down the line ....?

I met my current (quant fin) employer on the internet. While I was living in a trailer park.