Hmmmm?

Old timers disease, he is just talking to himself so he don't forget.

Jamie

One of the things we all know we ought to do is to share in other people's joys and sufferings. As St Paul says in Romans 12, "Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep."

It's a rather uncomfortable fact of common experience that #2 is a lot easier than #1.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yep. Though 'miso' is the butt of everyone's joke, I do feel sorry for him... and wonder why he feels the need to be so hateful. ...Jim Thompson

Where is the often-promised thing that my posts and all followups to my posts would be killfiled?

Can't get that to work?

Well, it's only a newsgroup.

I don't know the details, but there are companies that have set up just next door to the NYSE and such, to shave milliseconds off their transaction delays. They spot tiny differences in buy/sell opportunities and trade stocks for literally seconds.

This, done by hundreds of players, could have interesting instabilities.

This sounds like pure parasitism to me, and soaks up some of the best math grads in the country. A small transaction tax would kill this off.

The subject is 'subjective', so I'm inclined to agree. I was a self-learner cuz I worked. I did the exams when I felt I needed to and arranged appointments with Profs at mutually convenient times, always well prep'd. For labs, I'd start ~7:30am fresh and burn-out by 11:00, and consolidate. Not sure what alphabet I can hang off the end of my name. For fun I'd assist the Profs in their personal research. Regards Ken

I don't believe you are ever "taught", you either choose or not, to "learn" what your environment presents to your view.

A new learning experience a day keeps the undertaker away ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Yeah, but learning from some teachers is easier than learning from others!

Indeed. Speaking of things that keep you going... how's the hip these days? I happened to be talking to an orthopedist the other day, and he was mentioning that there are so many new types of artificial hips available now that, while they're all trying hard to outlast the traditional ~10 year lifespan of the metal ball/plastic socket approach, they haven't been around long enough to really know their longevity yet.

I'm doing great. November 1 will be 5 years. They told me when they did the replacement that it (Stryker) was good for at least 15 years. Knock on wood! ...Jim Thompson

My sigfile is actually a search engine experiment. It was suggested to me by, well, someone.

No, I wanted to learn engineering: physics, math, electromagnetics, thermo, materials, mechanics, circuit analysis, signals+systems, communications theory. Everything considered, Tulane did a pretty good job of teaching that stuff, probably about as well as any undergrad school would. Electric Machinery and Psychology and Beginners' Tumbling were great, too. English, economics, philosophy, and chemistry were probably about as bad as anywhere else, too.

I definitely agree with you Bob. I spent two years at community college before transferring to UBC (which I think Phil Hobbs has given a thumbs-up to) to complete my BASc. While the instructors at UBC were good, on average the ones at the community college were better. I suspect that had I gone on for a Masters or PhD, the quality of instruction might have improved.

Over a decade ago I worked for a day trading company. They always wanted the best, fastest and latest trading software to stay ahead of the competition. The problem is the software developers sell to everyone so you get a never ending race. Still, losing money is easier than making money. Judging the state of mind of some traders I often thought about removing the handles that open the windows.

Its not only about riding up and down small changes in share value but also moving shares between various stock exchanges. Some shares are traded on several exchanges so they need to be transferred from one exchange to the other. Due to differences in demand the prices also vary between one stock exchange and the other so a profit can be made.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a lady who executed a project for a major bank- they used a bunch of double-PhDs and such like to set up kind of an arbitrage scheme with physical servers in various locations and sophisticated software to do high-frequency trading (she explained the underlying concept to me-- it is actually pretty straightforward and the use of it long pre-dates computers)- the project cost many millions of dollars.. it paid back 100% in just HOURS. There are unbelievable amounts of money in this sort of thing.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Both to win and to lose. When they win, it's theirs. When they lose, it's ours. What's not to like?

The late unpleasantness of 2008 wiped out more than the entire historical profits of the entire banking industry, the world over.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Cool -- glad to hear it's working out so well!

And this:

I'm surprised they didn't finance inventing fiber with a lower refractive index.

it depends. Let's suppose there exists an optimal sequence of trades ( fair assumption? ). The question then becomes whether an experienced trader and a programmer together can make a "meta" that approximates that sequence better than just the trader running "on instinct".

Doing this would require the trader to be the one on the hook, with the programmer being as ignorant as possible of the larger view of the thing. The programmer is there to encode the widget for the trader, nothing more.

SFAIK, markets still exist to produce an optimum "transfer function" between buyers and sellers, mainly by varying price. Trading is a win-win, even if Black-Sholes & the Efficient Markets Hypothesis cause misbehavior or don't hold over some domains ( fat tails, Black Swans).

I'd think the biggest risk would be hubris - the trader/programmer combo start thinking their poop don't stink. The market would then pounce on that error, and they'd get badly hurt.

SFAIK, the autopsy on the Flash Crash from 2010 says it did not cause anything more than a convergence on too-low prices for a short period of time. IMO, I think there was a shortage of liquidity, and that we've run on the ragged edged of liquidity

If you look at how firms managed cash in the 1950s and now, it's breathtakingly different.

I don't think it's *particularly* parasitic. Math grads gotta eat, too. Then again, I consider prices a public good. I don't know of any reason that higher transaction costs do anybody any good. If it turned out to be a good revenue generator, then I'd be for the tax.

-- Les Cargill