For the Love of Money

It's a dilemma, for sure, but a guy who's so apt to talk specifics in terms of his income and bonuses doesn't present himself as operating from a place of humility. I know people who went through roughly the same evolution he claims to, but the ones who actually internalized the lesson aren't humble-bragging to the NYT under a byline, but are actually out trying to do good with as little self-aggrandizement as possible.

Like it or not, the way in which he chose to share his message completely undermines it, and it doesn't make his current situation seem too terribly different from his previous ones. Less destructive and more functional, sure, but the dynamic seems largely unchanged.

It's somehow noble or good to not want to be rich after you've become so, is the cliché.

Yes, it is extremely important that you're pitching the right sort of clients and that you're proposing to do something which meaningfully impacts their business. My typical client towards the end of my career was a B2B SaaS company with $10 to $50 million in annual sales. Bringing me on was generally not their #1 activity in any given year -- after all, they all have dozens of full-time employees, so they can do lots of things in any given year -- but it was generally for an initiative with a fair amount of strategic importance on, typically, a product which everybody knew would make serious bank if the initiative worked out.

If you had come up to me and said "We're building an app and need an extra Rails programmer" I'd have said "Cool, I keep a list of folks I like. Let me hook you up with someone." rather than attempting to get that business. Like everybody else who is Good With Computers, I occasionally get pitched on "Hey my aunt has a catering business, maybe you should make her a website?" That will never, ever happen. By comparison, if you'd recently experimented with A/B testing a bit on your $X million a year SaaS product and had increased sales by 5%, I would be very, very interested in helping you find the next 5 to 15%.

If you're continuing to find very budget-sensitive clients, how are you prospecting for them? How are you qualifying them? How are you pitching them?

There are many ways to prospect for clients which will get you lots of crappy leads, like e.g. looking for gigs on Craigslist.

Qualifying clients is an art. You don't have to proceed directly to the "prying" questions like explicitly asking what the budget for a project is. Just ask basic getting-to-know-you questions like what their core line of business is and how many employees they have. If their core line of business is retailing Beanie Babies and they have two part-time employees it is unlikely they can afford professional services. If, on the other hand, they have two dozen engineers on staff, they probably can write any check you can currently envision asking for.

What are you selling them on? If you're selling them things that can get delivered by any other freelancer who speaks your language, stop doing that. Start only going after engagements which, assuming project success, meaningfully increase the revenues of their company. Get case studies about how you've done that previously. Make it mandatory that you build in metrics tracking into all your projects, so that your clients know the ROI you are getting (and so you can quote, in broad terms depending on the specifics of your relationship and legal commitments, the sort of ROI your projects have recently generated.)

HideNotSlide does not cause an order to "jump to the top of the order cue[sic]." It preserves your order entry time at a price that is contra the NBBO if there is not an order at Direct Edge at the NBBO (if there is an order at Direct Edge at the NBBO the incoming HideNotSlide order is filled).

I doubt "HFT" would be dramatically limited by a transaction tax. I believe that it would lower trading volume by some amount and widen the bid/ask by some amount. The number of "HFT" firms and their trading habits would look mostly the same though.

There was a big trade for a while where people had different account types. the CBOT matching engine, for example, had customer orders prioritized over marketmaker or firm, so customers actually COULD jump the line.

Some companies had customer accounts specifically so they could insert orders in higher priority in the queue (the tradeoff is that customers pay for CXLs, but you can just do the math to see when you should be using which account)

to @panarky of the comment, its not on the order of microseconds -- the stuff people used to rip on were flash orders, which are exactly 30 milliseconds.

So @panarky has a bit of a point about knowing the order in advance, but its still damn hard to profit from it. The narrative of just front running trades by having order information in front is just not feasible because of the bid-ask spread (the flash orders are to try to help maintain some semblance of BBO consistency across exchanges)

So as yummyfajitas says, it's not possible to sell ahead (saying "short ahead" in that way exposes you as not really knowing the trade, btw) or buy ahead in a way that necessarily affects price.