121–130 of 291 posts
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Not to nitpick, but I think they had derivatives before that.
Asset derivatives before running water? Do you have a citation?
Forward contracts in Sumer http://www.realmarkits.com/derivatives/3.0history.php
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But HFT's don't play much in those products, so they don't provide liquidity or make markets there either.
I'm working at an HFT that mostly trades commodities, some of which have awfully thin books.
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My impression is that traders mainly have a much easier time quantifying their value. When you can say "look, I literally made $10,000 today and $8,000 yesterday", it's easy to negotiate for a significant chunk of that in compensation. Your leaving would have a very direct effect on the bottom line. As a software developer, the value you provide is not quantifiable like that. Everyone works on the product, sure, but…
So it seems you are better off working in a profession with a very clear quantifiable performance metrics. Software development is not one of them unless you work for your own company. I am curious about making a list of professions that have quantifiable performance metrics. 1.Sales and Marketing 2.SEO 3.Bloggers 4 ..
The trivial conclusion is that starting your own company is how to be accurately rewarded for your work. But that assumes there's no way to better measure employee performance. It seems like measuring it for engineers and programmers is an impossibly hard problem (At least, that's implied from all of the well-run organizations that have given up or failed miserably on quantizing performance over the years.). However, I would like to see some creative attempts at making teams better at this.
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 :)
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I was wondering the same. How hard is it to go from a programmer to a trader in a bank?
Why be a trader in a bank? Lease a commodities seat and trade for your own account. How hard could it be?
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Is there too much competition to be a trader or anyone can become one ? If so, its seems much better idea to toil away to make millions than toil away at a remote chance to make a million in a startup.
I think it's quite hard now. Lots of prop firms have closed down, regulation has increased significantly and is only getting worse. There's less easy money to be made. The majority of new traders are farmed from ivy league or top private engineering schools. I've seen some people join as devs and swap into trading. Ironically in these cases they were terrible devs, but increased their salary several times by becoming…
Instead of tinkering about how the system can be made more just, viable, etc., instead of "hacking", the only "idea" that comes to the minds of so-called "innovators" is: how can i become THAT rich ?, where do i have to sign ?.
Sad, depressing, disgusting, predictable.
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It's sorta up for debate. My understanding, which is tiny and very limited, is that you can think of the role of finance operators as "liquidity providers". They're the grease in the wheels of capitalism; by either providing access to capital (via loans, or investment) or by matching buyers with sellers. A classical example is you're a farmer that wants to hedge the risk that your crop will fail due to random weather…
HFT people will argue that they provide more liquidity in the market - it's easier to sell your stocks because HF traders increase the overall volume, etc. A problem with their argument, (one of many) is that HFTs are not regulated market makers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker HFTs provide liquidity when the market's good, but you always have plenty of liquidity when the market's good. You only really need…
I think it is very stupid to allow a system to evolve where half the trading
is a bunch of short-term people trying to get information one-millionth of a
nano-second ahead of somebody else. It’s legalized front-running; I think
it’s basically evil and it should never have been able to reach the size
that it did ... why should all of us pay a little group of people to
engage in legalized front-running of our orders?
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It's sorta up for debate. My understanding, which is tiny and very limited, is that you can think of the role of finance operators as "liquidity providers". They're the grease in the wheels of capitalism; by either providing access to capital (via loans, or investment) or by matching buyers with sellers. A classical example is you're a farmer that wants to hedge the risk that your crop will fail due to random weather…
HFT people will argue that they provide more liquidity in the market - it's easier to sell your stocks because HF traders increase the overall volume, etc. A problem with their argument, (one of many) is that HFTs are not regulated market makers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker HFTs provide liquidity when the market's good, but you always have plenty of liquidity when the market's good. You only really need…
Providing liquidity in all situations might be useful, but it is an added bonus. If you don't do this, you are still a market maker.