131–140 of 169 posts
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Prop stands for "proprietary," it means that they trade their own money.
Correction: it means they trade private money. This could be their own money, but more often than not, it's the owner's/partner's money.
There are no sales reps with prop trading, it isn't an agency.
Guy makes living watching dead cats bounce, and correctly realising when it's bouncing and when it's peaking.
One day, he misses the peak, due to some SNAFU.
History.
I made a living doing exactly such for a little while, until I lost the whole damn lot due to having to reboot in the middle of a big position. Own damn fault, should have had another screen spare.
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"Invest directly in stock and bonds." That is pretty much the opposite advice you should take from those findings. In general, investors now have the widest array of low cost, diversified instruments available at any point in history. Most advisors who know what they are talking about, will tell you to take one of these options (a non-managed index fund, a highly diversified etf) and invest in that. Rebalance once a…
Well I do not advocate stock picking to beat the market. Just to construct the index tracker yourself instead of paying a fee for someone else to do it.
I would be amazed if a retail consumer could put together a balanced, diversified portfolio with the same cost as an actively managed fund. To try and compete with an etf or non-managed index fund is crazy.
I lost a shit ton of money at the firm where I work right now almost a year ago. I wrote software that began issuing trades outside of where it was expected to and did not stop. In a panic, I forced the server it was running on to terminate its process but trades were still open in the market. They had to be manually closed. I feel sick to my stomach even writing this right now, that hour I was trying to fix the prob…
Yeah, I think all of us HFT programmers have war stories like this. I got a friend that had his program take out the entire market... Usually it's best if the programmer is separate from the ops guy, but in this case it sounds like you got stuck doing both. That sucks. I've done a bit of trading myself and it's both boring and terrifying. The two worst emotions.
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Any suggestions for HFT programming reading material and background knowledge for that kind of work?
I learned most of it on the job, from the masters. So I don't really know about the literature. The non-finance part of it involves alot of real-time stuff, which is found in game programming, and also audio software. Also, you could read up on networking, TCP/IP, etc. As for risk control (by risk I mean bugs) I often wonder if there are lessons from eg. the nuclear industry, on how to keep complex, highly-strung sys…
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Hey Jbuzbee, This is what I thought as well when I was initially introduced to the idea of technical analysis and day trading. I was very skeptical. I don't want to call myself a probability expert but after studying poker theory and reading mainstream works like Fooled by Randomness, I bought into the idea that it was just a bunch of a guys throwing darts and the "winners" whom were trying to sell all their BS were…
> Being net positive 80% of all days traded with all your winners and losers falling in a relatively tight distribution -- luck can't create highly specific, repeated outcomes like that. Yes, it can. E.g. you could sell deep out-of-the-money puts and collect a $1 premium day after day, say 99% of all days. Until one day a {terrorist attack in the US, humongous earthquake in Japan} happens and you lose more money than…
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That's how most of us feel when we see articles about SF real estate or politics :-)
Why are you telling me? I don't post articles about SF real estate or politics, I just like to comment on them. In fact, I haven't posted anything so far :-)
"I guess this is only written for other San Franciscans? I couldn't make much sense of it and got bored pretty fast."
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Wealthfront posted a graph on that. I called them out on it on Twitter which they didn't appreciate.
Url please?
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Url please?
Yep, I tried to find the graph but failed. It would be interesting to see again. I have a professional interest in probability and stochastic processes, so it stuck in my mind.
I can't help but think of confidence and the illusion of control: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-ha... "Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hard-working professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of s…
To add to that, a friend 'got into being a trader' as a friend of his simply needed a large number of bodies to manage trades. Of a year the majority would fail, but would would do great - he would then tout all the 'good' traders out as being new super star traders, and use them to get new business. As long as he had a large enough pool he'd be sure to have a few that became multi-year profitable, and now command la…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4
More info for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of knowing who Derren Brown is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derren_Brown
Derren Brown is a British illusionist, mentalist, trickster, hypnotist, painter, writer, and sceptic. He is known for his appearances in television specials, stage productions, and British television series such as Trick of the Mind and Trick or Treat. Since the first broadcast of his show Derren Brown: Mind Control in 2000, Brown has become increasingly well known for his mind-reading act. He has written books for magicians as well as the general public.
Though his performances of mind-reading and other feats of mentalism may appear to be the result of psychic or paranormal practices, he claims no such abilities and frequently denounces those who do. Brown states at the beginning of his Trick of the Mind programmes that he achieves his results using a combination of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship".