It sounds like despite your ideas of what failure is, by age 25 you've learned and applied more than most people ever will.
I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
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Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#12An interesting post. I'd be interested hear what kind of background you've got. I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship. I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your…
I don't think he was being insulting. He was just explaining that the incentives discourage anyone from publicly disproving the efficient market hypothesis.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#13You can keep adding data points to your spline/polynomial interpolation, but that doesn't mean the model will be any better. In fact, for the purposes of predictive power, it will probably be worse. I'm not extremely well educated on the subject, so somebody correct me, but these predictive models have always struck me as just complicated splines. Add a thousand data points, and the "predictions" for old datapoints l…
Taleb's empiricism implies resisting generalization from data and limiting the derivation of general rules from particular observations as one can be missing hidden properties. Thus he believes that scientists, economists, historians, policy makers, businessmen, and financiers are victims of an illusion of pattern. They overestimate the value of rational explanations of past data, and underestimate the prevalence of…
"Fooled by Randomness" is a great book. But I sometimes feel about it the same way I feel about people who say lotteries are a waste of time: some people do win. And sometimes, despite everything, a transient pattern does repeat. How frustrating!
Edited to add this, which is sometimes also brought up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#14Seems like it'd be a better bet to apply all your skills to creating value (wealth) instead of just trying to push it around a smidge more efficiently.
In other words: find a real problem and solve it, increasing global wealth in the process, and collect the economic reward.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#15An interesting post. I'd be interested hear what kind of background you've got. I think your remark on finance professors is quite wrong. It takes quite a lot of dedication to do a Phd. I'm not great respecter of academic prestige, but its a bit insulting to imply that people fail their way into a professorship. I'd be more than happy to share some pointers on financial papers I've read and such. Just talk about your…
Could you elaborate on this? In which ways is "a random" walk incorrect? In what is high frequency trading based?
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#16You've learned a lot, so you're obviously not a failure, but I think your post illustrates how draining a winner-take-all field like quantitative trading can be. You can never be sure if your wins or losses are real or just mirages caused by noise. Humans need the emotional encouragement that incremental success brings. Nothing get's me excited to work more than a good day of sales or a thoughtful comment from a customer. It takes a special type of personality to keep on persisting in the face of repeated failure. Certain start-ups also have winner-take-all properties. Anything that relies on network externalities or advertising revenue is more risky. The rewards can be big, but I prefer markets where the product's value isn't a function of the customer base and success is more incremental.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#17[deleted]
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#18negative findings (and publishing those results) are just as useful as positive findings.
If that's true, I think it needs a lot of thought, then we at least know that negative findings are valued far less. I found that my TOE was wrong is not likely to win me a Nobel unless there are associated "positive" findings ...
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#19After eight years, I have nothing concrete to show for my efforts.
So sad, so true. This is what happens when you play a zero-sum game. Even if you win, someone has to lose.
Here's an idea. For the next 8 years, why don't you do something that helps others by making the pie bigger for everyone instead of just trying to game a bigger piece of a smaller pie for yourself.
When you do for others, you always have something concrete to show for your efforts. It may not be what you expected, but it will definitely be something worthwhile, I promise you.
Re: I might be a complete failure (after 8 years of work)
#20Many smart people have tried to "beat the markets" and failed. From what I've seen of it, this sort of activity is at best a form of numerology. Also, in trying to move money around slightly more efficiently than the next market analyst you're not really generating wealth as such, and your ideas and activities will leave no lasting value for society.
You may not be a failure, since the skills acquired in analysing trends can be utilised in other areas. The process of having promising looking preliminary results, only to find that they are illusory is familiar to many scientists.
Ultimately it comes down to what you really want to do with your life. Is your life only about moving money, or something else?