191–200 of 333 posts
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Can anyone confirm whether JP Morgan were able to decommission Kapital when they went to Athena? I've seen so many cases in banks where the old system is still running years and years after it was 'replaced'. And Kapital was used in so many, different, parts of the business.
The answer is no. Kapital persisted past Athena for many years and was not (seriously) considered for shutdown
Reminds me of what we used at the ATLAS experiment at CERN* . Python was tightly integrated with the application framework, Athena (which I just realize has the same name as JPM's Python framework!). You could use it as a job description language, and you would compose computation steps from classes you could write in C++. I think there was a separate `athena` executable that was just python with some packages pre-lo…
The Greek and Roman gods have always been a go-to for project names, LOL. We need to give some other cultures a shot!
Sometimes I'm constrained to a specific starting letter, so I've had to stretch it at times, like when I needed an 'S-' word... ended up going with 'Sinatra' since Nancy Sinatra performed 'You Only Live Twice' for that movie
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Can cause issues if you are accounting for things, e.g. "The sum of these values need to equal the sum of these values" In that case you'd then needs to avoid "sum_a == sum_b" and use instead "abs(sum_a - sum_b) < SOME_SMALL_VALUE"
You don’t do that though, there’s no use case to account with the output of a model.
Not to mention that there is a use case for auditing pricing models (as in external requirement, or internally) or comparing alternative models.
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The Greek and Roman gods have always been a go-to for project names, LOL. We need to give some other cultures a shot!
I go for James Bond references, when I can. 'Moonraker' is always a great choice. Sometimes I'm constrained to a specific starting letter, so I've had to stretch it at times, like when I needed an 'S-' word... ended up going with 'Sinatra' since Nancy Sinatra performed 'You Only Live Twice' for that movie
I can see the benefits of this collection of tools within an all-in-one monolith. Ease of deployment is a big benefit. I can also see the costs. As a stack its probably better in some ways than how a lot of other businesses operate as well as worse. There's probably a lot both ways. The mainframe mindset might be a factor here as well. The giant mainframe where all the magic happens is still a thing to behold and thi…
This is covered in the article, in the distinction between "code-first" and "data-first". Databases means that you leave the interaction with data to a third party, and the only thing you do is send commands and receive results. This is very different from having all the data in your program, and starting from that. I'm not sure if "code-first" is the right word from it. Perhaps another way to put it would be that when data is the most important thing, you don't want to encapsulate it in a "database object", you want it to be right here.
BAML Quartz was conceived by a bunch of front-office quants who had not the first idea about the software needs of a big bank beyond the front office. There was an arrogant assumption that front office software is obviously the most complicated/difficult variety of software within a bank and therefore any system designed with front office requirements at the forefront would, of course, be perfect for universal use. T…
Can you have a career in finance as an engineer with Python and without C/C++ (professional) experience? Your post really made think it, it's an attractive area to work in.
Depending on what kind of engineer, it is far better to go to the finance (front office quant, back office risk) side than the tech support side. They are less snobbish about autodidacts and pay is far better if you are willing to learn about things outside the dev sandbox.
(Our front office has a few quants and ex-quants with electric engineering background, I don't know of any software engineers there.)
I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. O…
I was the person who first deployed Python at Goldman Sachs. At the time it was an "unapproved technology" but the partner in charge of my division called me and said (This is literally word for word because partners didn't call me every day so I remember) Err....hi Sean, It's Armen. Uhh.... So I heard you like python.... well if someone was to uhh.... install python on the train... they probably wouldn't be fired. O…
Curious why would this high-powered person go to bat for a technology decision they didn’t seem to have done any risk assessment of? Wouldn’t he be liable if something was exploited and hurt and company, like his head would be on the chopping block for giving the go ahead when they traced it up the chain of command?
"Armen, did you tell Sean to install python?"
"No".
"Sean, did Armen tell you to install python?"
"Err... no. He said I probably wouldn't be fired."
"Well it turns out he's not right about everything. Here's a cardboard box for your things."
> I've mentioned that programmers are far too dismissive of MS Excel. You can achieve a awful lot with Excel: more, even, than some programmers can achieve without it This is one of the most underrated topics in tech imho. Spreadsheet is probably the pinnacle of how tech could be easily approachable by non tech people, in the "bike for the mind" sense. We came a long way down hill from there when you need an speciali…
problem as described to me is that excel starts being used for regulated processes and it's not well auditable, access controlled, changed controlled, tracked, etc etc. Then people need to implement the exact same process across departments and they're all using a separate excel sheet and they all submit different numbers. becomes a huge mess and so much more complicated and expensive systems become commissioned.