51–60 of 89 posts
Kind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?
Kind of reads 25 people's stories about "How I became a parasite". Why not create new things, instead of making a career out of leeching the wealth created by others?
Everyone benefits with more efficient markets. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking HFT/low frequency quant firms "leech wealth". You can get out of the trap by learning about what they do and the essential role they play in the proper functioning of our markets.
Firms specialize in intercepting trades and then placing trades faster than 99.9% of others.
These institutions hide behind "we provide liquidity" like it's a selfless act of kindness, whereas that's just a mere side effect, and just one of many.
The entire modern financial system is layers and layers of unneeded complexity that almost solely rose out of people trying to leech money from the system. These financial institutions have built the entire system around them so that now they can say "look at how essential we are!".
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Did you actually read them? I didn't go to NYC, but Money is fungible so it's a simple math problem. How much non-parasite good can you do making $50k/year * 10 years? Even if we ignore taxes and you donated your entire salary, that tops out at $500k worth. If instead you could make, say, $500k/year * 10 years, and then quit and form your own non-profit for $2,000,000 and do 4x as much good.
If you’re only make on average 500k/year after 10y — you’re not really in the game at all
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> but these days for most people there’s little to no new maths. You are right. For most people there's little to no new maths. But not for all. There's still plenty of good quality math to be done in the exotics space. However, there's a bit of Catch 22 that prevents people from doing new math: all the big shops have had exotics libraries since before 2008, and because of the exotics hiatus between about 2008 and ma…
What is being meant by exotics in this discussion?
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I came across this guide (dated 2025) a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. Not a quant or even in finance though, so I don’t know how accurate it is: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/da7zfjj2rplwzf2sfiriz/Buy-Sid...
What's a convenient and safe way to open PDFs safely? Some options seem to be: Upload to google drive (inconvenient), use some open-source tool (LLM suggests DangerZone), use a VM (very inconvenient)
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I came across this guide (dated 2025) a couple years ago and thought it was interesting. Not a quant or even in finance though, so I don’t know how accurate it is: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/da7zfjj2rplwzf2sfiriz/Buy-Sid...
What's a convenient and safe way to open PDFs safely? Some options seem to be: Upload to google drive (inconvenient), use some open-source tool (LLM suggests DangerZone), use a VM (very inconvenient)
Pay per view was an expensive, business model for cable. For PDF's, it's even more expensive.
Note: It's more convenient than full, per-app, physical security.
that's a whole-ass book! I nearly crashed my poor little box, she barely has the ram to open 400+ page PDFs without my browser also being open.
This sounds like you're on a Pentium 386
I wonder how fun being a modern quant really is. It seems like one of those things that sounds more fun in your head, but the reality is different. Kinda like "studying physics", going pro in a sport, or becoming a rockstar. People see the end result and don't see how much work it takes to get there or what the day to day is really like
Good instinct. A lot of the day to day is debugging nitty things, reconciling small differences in results, trying not to make dumb mistakes. Almost all attempts to do very smart theoretical novel work fail, often because of extremely mundane engineering and data issues.
Unless you happen to be in a place like RenTech, perhaps?
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Did you actually read them? I didn't go to NYC, but Money is fungible so it's a simple math problem. How much non-parasite good can you do making $50k/year * 10 years? Even if we ignore taxes and you donated your entire salary, that tops out at $500k worth. If instead you could make, say, $500k/year * 10 years, and then quit and form your own non-profit for $2,000,000 and do 4x as much good.
I get your point, but that was the exact logic of Effective Altruism and Sam Altman is now jailed for the Largest Fraud of All Time. It's a slippery slope.
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i don't know what the point of this book is - there's nothing rockstar about being a quant. not only do not all quants "generate alpha", even the ones that do are just overworked data scientists. ask anyone that actually works in the industry - fancy math is no longer a thing ("exotic option pricing"). so would "how i became an accountant" be just as interesting? how about (more accurately) would "how i became a data…
> ask anyone that actually works in the industry - fancy math is no longer a thing Huh? What happened? This is a very interesting claim I would love to hear elaborated
Some assets are very easy to price, like bonds. Others are esoteric, like Exotics which are options or other securities with uncommon pricing structures. This is where the "fancy math" kicks in. But as time goes on, more and more firms figure out how to better price all the various assets that they trade, which erodes the competitive edge between market participants.
The assertion is that today, most firms have most things mostly figured out as far as how to value them. There's little to no competitive advantage to be mined from esoteric stochastic calculus. In contrast, it's rumoured that one of the most successful firms of all time, Renaissance, owes a large part of their success to their absolutely pristine data which comes from a massive data ingestion and cleaning pipeline, allowing them to get a clearer statistical picture of what the current market forces at play are, and how they're going to manifest.