241–250 of 392 posts
My greatest regret is not getting into this firm
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If you're going to hold AAPL longer than a quarter, then the tick vs. 1/8 doesn't matter, and if you're not, your trade doesn't need to happen to support the core goal of financial markets which is to finance companies.
You are really going to need a citation to back up that the core goal of financial markets is to finance companies. That is, in my view, at best an ancillary goal (notice that most money in the markets doesn’t participate in buying shares from the company itself). That may be what you want the markets to be about but every other participant has other desires from the markets and the great thing is they can all get wh…
It's also true there are many other participants with many other strategies to extract that value created by the companies from acquiring and merging them to collecting dividends from a balanced portfolio to day trading, but the reason the market exists in the first place is because companies that create value need their capital in order to do it. As you correctly point out, most of the actual trades are secondary market ones involving companies not in the process of fundraising, but those trades are still positive sum inasmuch as without liquid secondary markets, companies that create the actual value might have found it too hard to raise funding. The difference between being able to sell TWTR on IPO day or shortly afterwards and being forced to hold it until an Elon Musk comes along and follows through with its existence has a huge impact on its ability to raise funds and grow. On the other hand reducing the time between trades down to smaller sub-second microsecond intervals is - whilst useful to people trying to win at essentially zero-sum trading games and inflating asset prices very slightly - going to have a pretty minimal impact on whether companies create more value by raising more funds.
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Having worked in HFT for well over a decade now, I'd say OCaml is more of a deterrent than helps in getting access to larger pool of talent.
Esoteric languages is often a good screener for good devs. A large talent pool isn't necessarily a positive if you don't spend a lot of effort on your recruiting (mostly filtering) process. It really just increases the risk of bad hires.
There's one thing that always baffles me about this kind of market work. Let's for the sake of argument assume that HFT and other sophisticated market making activities are crucial for price discovery and other great social benefits. Then why does this amazingly important social good get mostly turned off over 80% of the time[1]? Even as a retail buy-and-hold investor in boring ETFs not being able to trade outside no…
If you want the best price, you need to have all of the market participants bidding together. Market hours serve as a coordinated period in which ~all market participants agree to be online and bidding. Prices, thus, get stale overnight. But we assume that that is mostly okay, as business is normally conducted during business hours, and we assume that transactions can wait until the next day. ACH transfers take multiple days! (technically so do stocks, but that's mostly invisible to retail traders).
If you're a retail trader, I would caution you somewhat against trading after-hours; there is very little liquidity and it could cost you 100s of bps more.
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I think the author meant "could retire very comfortably in their 30s", and you're correct to point out that's not what it literally says. But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta if you're in that league and start out of undergrad. In my experience (more than a few of my FAANG-era colleagues either came from or went to high-technology finance), people don't actually leave Google to…
> I think people go to high-technology finance because they want to test themselves against a harder class of problem in a more adversarial setting against people who feel the same. Maybe this is so at other finance firms, but my experience with developers who go to Jane Street is quite different. Because Jane Street heavily advertises OCaml as part of its recruiting strategy, I know many people who ended up there ju…
This and getting people to click more ads. What a great use of innovation and bright minds.
>the winners get a job from which people routinely retire rich in their 30s, and the losers... don't Honestly, I find this ridiculous. Firstly, Yes, working at Jane Street is a well paying job and you'll do well out of it. No. People aren't routinely retiring in their 30s. I don't understand where this absurd idea comes from. Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retire…
> People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity I guess I must not be driven, because I would. Or at least something close enough to that. $5m just earning interest at 5%ish is way more income than I need to live the lifestyle I want. I'd buy a few acres in the middle of no where, build a nice house, grow a big garden, raise my daughter as a nice family man and never wo…
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Michael Lewis is a great writer, but the closer you are to the subject the more his shortcomings are exposed. I felt the same way about The Big Short and to some extent Liar’s Poker. He has an annoying tendency to assume that if he doesn’t understand something, either it’s completely inscrutable to everyone or simply BS. (And to pile on, The Blind Side was the touching story of how Lewis’s prep school classmate, an O…
While I agree that Flash Boys was below par, what's wrong with The Big Short? I thought that was well done, accessible, and largely accurate.
It's a decent book, and a decent movie (kudos for one particular scene where I recognized data from the actual LoanPerformance database) I actually prefer the movie Margin Call for more accurately capturing the feel of the crisis from inside a bank.