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For the Love of Money

nytimes.com

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Re: For the Love of Money

#251

Post by vehementi »

joseph_cooney wrote: post #133
bigbang wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a typical path from dev->trader? Should one join a hedge fund as a programmer and then step up the ladder?

A friend of mine works in a trading company. He said all the traders want to become devs, because it is the only skill that they've seen up close that translates outside of the mad-house of trading, and they (the traders) all know eventually their number will be up.

Why would they want to work as relatively tiny salaried devs after getting million dollar bonuses, rather than just retire?

Re: For the Love of Money

#252

Post by vehementi »

vacri wrote: post #208
javajosh wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If he doesn't feel like working hard, he could probably use his VC connections as a cash cow... Actually, if he doesn't feel like working hard, it sounds like he could retire on a comfortable 6-figure income for the rest of his life. Without interest, naively $6m will yield $100k a year for 60 years, which is more than enough to raise a large family in a nice neighborhood anywhere in the states - especially if the h…

Without interest, 100k/year now is a lot, but in 60 years will be very, very little. Have a look at average salaries now compared to 60 years ago - from memory it's a little over a factor of 10 difference.

Not hard to choose a % that gives constant ish real returns forever

Re: For the Love of Money

#253

Post by mbillie1 »

jellicle wrote: post #250
mbillie1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ..."

It's a term of art in the marketing world. Legitimate jargon. What's an equivalent... hmm, suppose I talk "a pull" in the context of a version control system. I'm talking about something with a specific meaning. It would be wrong to try to correct me and tell me I should talk about "a thing that is pulled".

Except that a pull in VCS is a separate thing. "An ask" seems to always mean "the thing that we are asking for," not some nuanced alternative or domain-specific concept.

Re: For the Love of Money

#254

Post by kelvin0 »

gadders wrote: post #219
perfunctory wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious how do you tell a pseudo-confession from a genuine one.

See if they have a book or other project to publicise.

So I guess everyone marketing a book is a phony? You never learned anything valuable written by someone who marketed it and believed in it? I though I was cynical ... you Sir are the King.

Re: For the Love of Money

#255

Post by vehementi »

kamaal wrote: post #178
king_jester wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. One of the key points of this essay is that making more money doesn't necessarily improve one's quality of life. The author clearly talks about at age 25 being financially secure and wealthy, so his pursuit of additional wealth wasn't really about an increase in quality of life. > You can be rich and unhappy, or poor…

>>One of the key points of this essay is that making more money doesn't necessarily improve one's quality of life. No, actually the article says addictive preference towards money doesn't improve quality of life. Not having lots of money. Having lots of money nearly undoubtedly increases your quality of life. >>There are levels of income that are wholly satisfactory for an individual's life that still classify that p…

By QOL here we're talking about happiness. After a certain point (once you have the things you want & don't have to worry about things) more money doesn't bring more happiness. Hedonistic adaptation crushes this down further.

Re: For the Love of Money

#256

Post by mindcrime »

ItendToDisagree wrote: post #197
mindcrime wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been stated... The derivatives trading business was a prime culprit for the crash of 2008 so I think it is fair to say that some lying, cheating, stealing went on and the subsection of finance the author was involved in was complacent in it. Yes that's been stated , but I wouldn't say that it's been proven . There are a LOT of theories about what did and didn't happen as part of the 2008 financial crisis and i…

There are lots of insiders who think that the issues with derivatives market were the cause... In fact the commodity futures trading commission more or less said that their evaluation was that there was a concerted effort to use derivatives to obfuscate risks and for the most part caused the issue. That is fine that one guy wrote a book about the crisis. And it is very nice that he decided to pass the buck on who was…

There are lots of insiders who think that the issues with derivatives market were the cause... In fact the commodity futures trading commission more or less said that their evaluation was that there was a concerted effort to use derivatives to obfuscate risks and for the most part caused the issue.

Again, I'm not arguing that it hasn't been stated, or suggested, or argued that "derivatives were one of the big causes of the crisis". I'm arguing that it hasn't been proven, and that there are other, credible, competing views. And even to the extent that derivatives might have been a significant part of what happened, one can question if they were the cause - or whether there might have been "upstream" causes which pulled the derivatives trading along for the ride.

That is fine that one guy wrote a book about the crisis. And it is very nice that he decided to pass the buck on who was at fault by using the stale "Big Government Is Bad!" and "Any Regulation Is Big Government!" lines.

A lot of people wrote books about the crisis. But from your discussion here it seems to me that your mind is made up regarding what did or didn't happen, so this discussion is probably pointless.

Perhaps everyone should just believe John Allison and his incredibly strong (Ayn) Randian ideological bent though?

Are you suggesting that? Because I'm not. And what, exactly, does Rand have to do with this? Ideology is irrelevant, an argument is sound (or not) regardless of the ideological orientation of the initiator of that argument.

8Also you seem to be missing the point on the Wall St. vs Main St. thing... The bigger issue to most is that somehow Wall St. firms are 'too big to fail' and the little guy (read: everyone else) had to give them a huge bailout because they gambled and lost. In the eyes of most, its as if they had to pay for someone's trip to the casino, out of their own taxes.*

Oh, whoah, whoah, whoah... you seem to be assuming that I approved of the bailouts. Absolutely not. I was as angry as anybody you're going to meet about that bullshit. And yes, that particular aspect of the whole situation, the "why should I bail you out because you made bad choices" line of thinking, I mostly support.

* It's about having to pay for your losses yourself, rather than having everyone else bail your ass out to the tune of billions of dollars. Taking all of the risk out of the system for the big boys, while it still exists for everyone else seems pretty BS (especially if you're part of 'everyone else').*

Absolutely. But I see that as an indictment of the corruption in our government, and the "crony capitalism" we have going on, not as an indictment of just "Wall Street" in and of itself.

Re: For the Love of Money

#257

Post by fuddle »

31reasons wrote: post #83

I am just wondering, are these Wall Street traders smarter than an average techie working in Silicon Valley ? Are they so irreplaceable that they are offered so much salary and bonuses ? It just doesn't seem right. I am afraid to even ask for 150k salary in SV for the same amount of cerebral work.

“You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.” - Warren Buffett

Re: For the Love of Money

#258

Post by harryh »

smartbuttcute wrote: post #231
harryh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charlie, as a guy who regularly buys and sells large volumes of stock, is just talking his book. It would be great for him if he could make large transactions without the stock price responding quickly to this new information. But it would be bad for everyone he transacted with. To make this concrete: Say Charlie & Warren wake up one day and decide Company X is undervalued and that they want to by 5% of it. They star…

The large investment banks actually have a code they can append to their orders so they can jump to the top of the order cue. That is the definition of "front running". I'd like to see a 1 cent tax per share per transaction. That'd dramatically limit HFT.

Why would a tax limit HFT and not just push spreads apart by the amount of the tax?

Re: For the Love of Money

#259

Post by napoleond »

31reasons wrote: post #246
patio11 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use software development to achieve very quantifiable results for companies. If you do, there are a variety of ways to turn that into what you want out of life. One avenue of many is hanging out your shingle as a consultant and charging what your empirical results suggest you can get away with. (I've been beating this drum on HN for a few years. The PG essay on wealth, linked in a sibling comment, is probably…

Thanks Patrick! >>You can use software development to achieve very quantifiable results for companies. Can you direct me to books / resources to understand more in depth what you are talking about here. I have read what you are saying many times but never quite get it. I am struggling to understand why would someone want to pay me % of their profit when they can hire some programmer for $50/hour. Is it about how you…

Far be it from me to speak for Patrick, but generally the sales pitch for this sort of arrangement does not sound like "Hi, I'm a programmer. I'll build anything you want if you pay me 2% of your company's profits this year." It's more like "Hi, I'm a business consultant. I possess a specific set of skills which involve using software to increase profits for businesses such as yours, often by as much as 5%. My services cost an amount which is comparable to 2% of your current annual profits." (The numbers in that example were picked at random, but obviously the return needs to be higher than the investment for things to work.)

In other words, it's pretty uncommon (and generally ill-advised, IMO) to ask for a "% of profit". What you are doing is anchoring your price tag against the value you can create, instead of the time you spend. (This is somewhat muddled by the fact that consulting engagements are generally billed by multiplying a dollar rate with the amount of time over which the engagement took place, but the only number that matters to the client is the one at the bottom of the invoice. It is the consultant's responsibility to find clients for which that last sentence is true, and to make sure that they are able to consistently generate positive ROIs for those clients most of the time.)

Re: For the Love of Money

#260

Post by harryh »

lmm wrote: post #191
harryh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if Jack does't want to build the bridge and he holds enough of the company then he gets to say "stop building the bridge."

Is there evidence that's actually what's happening? I hear a lot of complaints on the internet about a quarterly results focus, but I've never heard of shareholders actually telling a company to change tack.

Every time a CEO gets fired by the board of directors that's the shareholders telling the company to change tack.
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