I worked at UBS on the G10 FX options desks in Stamford and Singapore. Remember being very surprised by how my interview and training were incredibly stressful. It was very intentional as well, where my trainer knew the exact reactions he was creating with his behavior.
It was only a couple of weeks in, when I had to react within 60 seconds (USDJPY option expiry, NYC cut) on a position our front book would have lost MM on; with senior sales MDs screaming at me as well. Lo and behold, I was just used to it and could focus and execute based on my training.
My wife calls my thinking on the training - Stockholm syndrome. I still believe those skills were incredibly valuable for me, just perhaps delivered in a more 2021 acceptable approach.
Thank you so much for this context! When I started at Lehman in 2007 and for years through the i-banks & hedge-funds, 'Sec-db' was the North Star for so much me and my friends built. It's amazing to hear from the folk who brought that to life!
Took many more years for us to understand that we had learned more about banking and making money than our masters had learned about the potential uses of the platforms we had built.
We started Sandbox Banking. Many of our friends are at hedge-funds :-(. What's the career paths of those that first built sec-db?
Almost single major oil company & refinery has a team of traders that directly participate (or use the investment banks / futures brokers) in the crude oil and refined product futures / options markets. This is both for hedging and speculation. If a refinery knows when it's going down for (un)planned, it lets it's traders know and they do trade on that info. In commodities markets, this is legal and does not constitute insider trading.
As others have mentioned, there isn't really much of a difference (apart from fees) when you're thinking about it as a vehicle for long-term holdings. Most of the time, 401k plans will not let you hold ETFs - they only let you hold mutual funds. Mutual funds usually can't be traded intra-day. You place your order and they buy/sell at the stated NAV on the close. ETFs can normally be traded intra-day. Again, ex-fees irrelevant to a truly long-term buy-hold-rebalance portfolio.
Not sure I understand why we can assume that its all trades are entirely "independent" here.
Agree with you that HFT performance is not correlated with market direction. But given the volume of trades it would imply that many of the trades are occurring on a smaller pool of equity instruments. I'd think that given liquidity constraints and competition that there's a sweet spot in terms of number of stocks that a given strategy is actually efficient on.
So not entirely sure why we consider every trade to be iid - rapid shocks (flash crash), equity specific news etc would affect a number of trades at once changing the 51% probability?
Also does anyone know if the profitability numbers include payments to be a market-maker?
Apart from the volume characteristic this doesn't seem to hold. Vanguard creates ETFs on diversified baskets of stocks picked(rules based) by other people eg: S&P, Nasdaq etc. YC actually has to review each and every application and independently determine whether to accept them.
At a push, I'd go with - Investing in stocks:Vanguard :: Investing in companies : Random funds that will only invest if you have a brand-name lead investor
So we raised on a convertible note with a cap and a discount. We're from the east coast and our accessible angel pool balked at SAFEs. An argument for a different thread :-).
I'd defer to Paul's point that choosing a too high (or non-existent) cap makes no sense. We did have to negotiate our cap and we set it so that we had a realistic shot of hitting 2-3x that in Series A pre money which in my mind is why an angel should be investing. I'd personally consider it a disappointing outcome if I raised at my cap and I'd hope my investors would as well.
A cap is not a valuation and I agree that everyone thinking it is, is a problem.
Agreed. We walked all our angels through a 3 scenario (low, goal, home-run) Series A pre-money valuation analysis using a calculator. Bit overwhelming for some but everyone appreciated the effort.
The biggest benefits of the note structure to us were a) Rolling close b) Not wasting time debating "valuation" when neither us nor the angels were capable of estimating a number with limited to no data.
Seems like most of the comments hate on REST because it's been poorly implemented by an API developer. Why is the solution yet another API protocol (JSONpure) and not stricter enforcement? (Idealistic i know...)
The point about SOAP not requiring documentation makes no sense either. You'd still need to document what the underlying fields in the various endpoints are. (We build against a lot of terribly documented SOAP APIs and its pure torture)
In terms of PUT (and PATCH) not being extensively used - it comes down to your use case. For the idempotent micro-services we build APIs against, there is a massive difference in the behavior expected for POST/PUT/PATCH and it would be pretty burdensome (and limiting) to have to create parsing code on the server for POST.
You guys seem to make setting up Deep Learning infrastructure easy for data scientists which is awesome! What about situations where the end user/business isn't sure exactly how to use Deep Learning (which algorithm, how to partition the data into training and result sets, stability of results etc.) for the problem/data set at hand? Would it be possible to use FloydHub as a marketplace of sorts where I could hire a deep learning enthusiast to appropriately construct the experiment for me and then explain the results?
It was only a couple of weeks in, when I had to react within 60 seconds (USDJPY option expiry, NYC cut) on a position our front book would have lost MM on; with senior sales MDs screaming at me as well. Lo and behold, I was just used to it and could focus and execute based on my training.
My wife calls my thinking on the training - Stockholm syndrome. I still believe those skills were incredibly valuable for me, just perhaps delivered in a more 2021 acceptable approach.