261–270 of 291 posts
I like how after all that, he ends with an ask for a quarter of his readers' bonuses to start a fund for his philanthropy old habits die hard :)
> an ask Can this new idiom be stricken from our collective lexicon? I've heard this a lot lately in the tech community (although mostly from manager types) and it's a linguistic abomination. "...he ends by asking ..."
Do programmers on Wall Street ever see similar bonuses, or is it necessary to work on the trading floor?
No way. Programmers are on the wrong side of the suit/geek divide, which is something like the blood-brain barrier.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So ... the exchange processing the trade -- where's it getting its liquidity from? If it can't satisfy the trade internally, it's getting buy/sell orders from elsewhere, correct? Or flip this around: instead of telling me how HFTs can't arbitrage their trades, tell me what's actually happening. Because HFT's like deepwater oil drilling: it's an awfully expensive hobby to be doing if there's no profit in it. Where's t…
An exchange doesn't have liquidity, it's merely providing a matching engine/order book for outside traders to post orders.
What's the mechanism for matching buyers and sellers?
Does HFT provide a benefit to the HF trader? If so, from whom does that advantage accrue?
What's the net effect on a non-HFT buyer with and without the presence of HFT? For market orders? For limit orders?
What's the net effect on a non-HFT seller with and without the presence of HFT? For market orders? For limit orders?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No way. Programmers are on the wrong side of the suit/geek divide, which is something like the blood-brain barrier.
Bummer. I suppose what I should really be asking, though, is this: do programmers on Wall Street make enough to live comfortably in the city while still hitting normal savings goals, like retirement? For Manhattan, I'm thinking this would be a total comp. of $200k or above.
Whenever I see rich guys forfeiting on more money so they can help the poor, I remember this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others... TL;DR: If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour t…
To address your second comment, we must consider the possibility that people are interested in long-term solutions to problems. What happens when the person who thinks that his profession makes too much money has given away all his money? Is the problem fixed?
The world isn't binary. When someone says "I want to help the poor", there's a world of meaning you can gather from context. We aren't AliceBot, we're humans. And humans are fairly good at understanding statements like that. After all, one way to help people is to kill oneself in a manner that preserves organs for donation, but you'd dismiss this kind of meaning even coming from a down and out guy who makes nothing and has no family. Why? What's he implying when he says he wants to help people?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An exchange doesn't have liquidity, it's merely providing a matching engine/order book for outside traders to post orders.
For an exchange to transact a trade, it needs buyers and sellers. What's the mechanism for matching buyers and sellers? Does HFT provide a benefit to the HF trader? If so, from whom does that advantage accrue? What's the net effect on a non-HFT buyer with and without the presence of HFT? For market orders? For limit orders? What's the net effect on a non-HFT seller with and without the presence of HFT? For market ord…
HFT provides liquidity to all other traders, including other HFT. They are paid in either the bid-ask spread (in the case that HFT is passive) or arbitrating bid-ask spreads between different exchanges, e.g. they aggress and take out an offer on exchange A which is below the bid on exchange B, providing liquidity to the standing offer on exchange A immediately instead of letting the prices disjoin.
The answer to the last two lines are the same -- there is no meaningful difference between a buy and a sell. The net effect is more liquidity than without any short term market making, for both market and limit orders (IMO market orders should simply not exist, but that's a small aside).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're talking about risk/reward tradeoffs a lot in this thread. Doing a startup vs. working as an employee is one of these tradeoffs. If you do a startup you'll get paid closer to what you're actually worth, but maybe you don't generate any real wealth and go bust and get paid zero. If you're an employee, you get to hedge that risk against taking a small fraction of the wealth you generate.
For a Wall Street trader on the other hand, this tradeoff seems to not exist.
TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
so? good for him. I think it's an inescapable reality of the human condition: we suffer an irresolvable emptiness. we make different choices about how to fill the unfillable hole. I think his choice to fill his by spreading hard-won wisdom and describing a path to honour is a smart solution to a problem we all face.
It's one rung up the ladder from the guys who make their money in ethically grey ways, find religion, preach their conversion, but keep the money. (But it's still a rung up, mind you, and that's a good thing.)
Good for him that he earned so much, and that he seems to have found meaning in things besides money, but the story is pretty clichéd.
And I'm not sure "irresolvable emptiness" and an "unfillable hole" is quite so universal as you seem to indicate, nor do I think all attempts at filling voids are of equal value. (I'm not saying you do, either, just trying to be clear.)
TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
This is a perfect example of the cynic snarkiness for the sake of snarkiness that plagues Hacker News; the guy of the article only has written one article besides this one[0] and that's it. He doesn't even have a profile pic or a clickable profile as most journalist in the NYT have. And he seems to spend his time as the director of something called groceryships not creating support groups for money addicts or selling…
And I wasn't being sharply critical (snarky) for the sake of being sharply critical. Honest.
He's pretty actively promoting himself, his story, and his business (which is what it is) online, and he just successfully SEO-bombed his way to the top of the charts. You may think it's out of an abundance of goodness, but I think that's as naive a view as you think mine is cynically snarky. (Or snarkily cynical.)
TL;DR: He used to use drugs and booze to deal with his insecurities. Then he used money. Now he (apparently) uses the attention that comes from telling everyone how wise and honorable he has become.
This is a perfect example of the cynic snarkiness for the sake of snarkiness that plagues Hacker News; the guy of the article only has written one article besides this one[0] and that's it. He doesn't even have a profile pic or a clickable profile as most journalist in the NYT have. And he seems to spend his time as the director of something called groceryships not creating support groups for money addicts or selling…