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Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

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Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#81

Post by AlexC04 »

crasshopper wrote: post #63
joshkaufman wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

The short answer: Syntax Error. -- I spend a lot of time working with different languages and frameworks. Though my day job is PHP, I've got an itch to make a mobile game.

Since they're not actually written in PHP, I've got to switch to a new language. ObjectiveC for iPhone, Android-Java, or any number of cross platform languages to pick up a third party framework.

On top of that - there's the issues of structure and stuff.

For learning a new language, there's no way to skim.

HOWEVER for something like an A* pathfinding algorythm (an artificial intelligence method of finding the most efficient path from A to Anywhere) - you can get the "Gist" by skimming a paper. I understand what A* is and how it does it ... but if I want to replicate it I still have to go over it line-by-line if I want to get it right though.

So, I think the short answer is "NO" coders can't skim stuff and get the job done right.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#82

Post by lsc »

sunkan wrote: post #37
joshkaufman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high. It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, an…

Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading? -- 10-20 minutes per book? -- 20 to 30 books in a few hours. I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins. I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.

It only works on books that are two pages of content padded out with three hundred pages of sales.

Fortunately, this is what nearly all "business" books are. They repeat that two pages of content over and over. If you spend 20 minutes skimming, chances are you will hit the actual content at least once.

Another interesting point is that most business books, if they cite references, usually only cite a few. Often times one can look up the paper(s) it references and get the actual content in a much more, ah, compact form, without most of the sales.

Of course, /actually reading/ business books rather than skimming them, I think, is a reasonable way to figure out how to talk to and even to sell to business people. I mean, that's what the book is doing, right? even if the actual "content" of the book is complete BS, if the book is a popular one, it's obviously good at selling to business people, and you can learn by example.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#83

Post by dedward »

chrisaycock wrote: post #44
noname123 wrote: post #12

DIY Financial Engineering: 1. Sign up for an Interactive Brokers account; state that you want to trade options. 2. Transfer >25K (day-trading capability) or whatever is reasonable amount money for you. Enough for you to care about but not over the amount where if you lost it all, you'd lose sleep over. 3. Now use the highest/lowest volatility scanner and buy/sell some options randomly in that list; max out your real…

> max out your real cash to accumulate positions (do not go on margin) Options can't be bought on margin. They lose value over time and thus can't be used as any form of collateral.

Cool if true - the one thing you want to make sure of when using the IB interface is that you don't accidentally end up on margin - which is easy fairly easy to do by accident.

(It's not that they try to get you there - it's just a trading platform for pros. A friend once told me how part if portfolio was sold automatically because of an automatic margin call when he didn't even realize hew as on margin)

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#84

Post by dedward »

noname123 wrote: post #52
genera wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By following Step 3, you will lose much more than whatever the amount was in Step 2.

Very true. Forgot to mention that if you sell options, you have unlimited loss potential; so by definition, this fear should motivate you to learn about delta-hedging and risk management very soon.

Depends what kind of options you are selling - but I'd actually say explicitly leave out writing calls from the plan - that's not somewhere you want to go given the unlimited risk you face.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#85

Post by verysimple »

crasshopper wrote: post #77
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.

Verysimple, how much actual reading do you think comes out of people bookmarking and voting up these lists? I would guess very little.

You can't know that. Reading is highly dependent on your perception of the activity. If you were conditioned to believe that learning is something that happens mostly in a classroom, then you'll perceive a book as "1000 pages to go through", a hurdle.

On the other hand, if you're conditioned to believe and trust in the transmission of knowledge through independent reading, like most autodidacts are, you perceive them as an opportunity to improve.

I, myself, am an autodidact programmer. I had never heard of many resources before encountering them in threads on HN, Reddit, or Stackoverflow. I haven't read all books, or followed all the videos, but at least, now that I'm aware of them, it prompted me to start working toward shifting a few things in my life to allow me the time and opportunity to dig deeper in the material.

It's a process.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#86

Post by crasshopper »

verysimple wrote: post #85
crasshopper wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Verysimple, how much actual reading do you think comes out of people bookmarking and voting up these lists? I would guess very little.

You can't know that. Reading is highly dependent on your perception of the activity. If you were conditioned to believe that learning is something that happens mostly in a classroom, then you'll perceive a book as "1000 pages to go through", a hurdle. On the other hand, if you're conditioned to believe and trust in the transmission of knowledge through independent reading, like most autodidacts are, you perceive them…

For me, the more hard drive space I have, the more PDF's I save. Doesn't mean I read them. The more time I spend on the web, the more "to-read should-read" stuff I find. Doesn't mean I read it.

Real reading happens for me when I shut the computer and focus on just one thing.

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#87

Post by lupatus »

sunkan wrote: post #37
joshkaufman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high. It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, an…

Wow! Has anyone else achieved this level of efficiency in their reading? -- 10-20 minutes per book? -- 20 to 30 books in a few hours. I am a bit skeptical, but maybe it is doable. I am curios to know if anyone else on HN can read/comprehend a non-fiction business book in less than 30 mins. I went ahead and ordered '10 days to faster reading'.

Teddy Roosevelt was known for his speed-reading ability:

http://artofmanliness.com/2009/10/18/how-to-speed-read-like-...

Re: Do It Yourself Masters in Financial Engineering

#88

Post by joshkaufman »

gcb wrote: post #58
joshkaufman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I do, only I've practiced enough to cut the time per book to 10-20 minutes, depending on complexity. Reading for information extraction vs. word-for-word is much more efficient, and if you practice, your comprehension and retention is just as high. It's not uncommon for me to go to the library or B&N and read a stack of 20-30 books in a few hours. I've been reading business books for six years, an…

So, should I assume i can read your book in 20min? Or did you filled it with fluff and filler? :)

Quite the opposite, actually - I tried to write a fluff-free business book. I think that's why readers are finding it useful. If you can read it in 20 minutes, I'll be impressed. :-)
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