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I don't have any idols, but I do feel I owe a massive intellecutual debt to a lot of the greats. There are clearly many brilliant traders out there, but few have chosen to make their thoughts public. So I don't think attempts to rank traders are meaningful because those "lists of greats" are...

This figure is true, but means a lot less than you think. Aside from mean, median and standard deviation are other important things to know about statistics :) Most Goldman employees at the juniorish level get paid less than elsewhere on the Street. It's euphemistically called paying for...

This is very accurate. The vast majority of people don't get how your standard of living and it's associated costs steadily creeps up as you make more money. People who think that if their fairy godmother waved a wand and pufft! they stepped into an alternate universe where they made $500,000 or...

People who are serious about trading know that you can't accomplish everything by yourself alone. Or rather the full potential of what you can achieve is not best unleashed working alone. Working formally or informally in packs is superior. And people of talent in markets tend to congregate...

I find it's a surprisingly good mag. A lot of Wall St stories and gossip they write about are spot on. Of course it's got fanboy aspects and the whole "cigar-watch-plane" bit is basically Maxxim for the trader set, but in the mix are some genuinely interesting tit bits.

Dollars and cents, holding EST time zone constant, the best place to trade from would probably be from some city in South America. You might even be able to wrangle the $80,000 or so deduction for living abroad, on top of of no state taxes and very low cost of living. In addition, living...

I'm not just relying on a bullshit survey to form my opinion. I've spent a fair amount of time in Tokyo, London, New York, the Bay Area, Shanghai, Singapore, Bangkok and I can tell you what restaurant meals and apartment rentals cost in those cities. Believe what you will, but your cost of...

Quote from Rearden Metal: Right, we keep them living in fear of the prohibition enforcement goons instead. While the AIDS situation here is obviously much better than many places, we do have the <b>world's highest incarceration rate</b>. whoa there! a lot of honest hardworking folk...

Clearly revealing my inner geek and data junkie status, but how about a section for metrics about ET? daily post frequency new member frequency running top 100 thread count could even go into content analysis: Number of times "god" is used in previous month

NYC is an expensive city, both in terms of cost of living and tax structure. So on both those counts its a lousy place for a day trader to be based. However, a lot of smart people who know a lot about markets live in NYC, and if you can find a way to spend time with them, you are learn a...

Monte Carlo methods are not really a formula or set of instructions - it's really an approach to problem solving. Let's say you want to know what's the worse week you can have at the 90th percent level. ie - only 10% of weeks will be worse than this. You can come up with some elaborate...

Mean Variance tests - a previous poster had written about a modification of adding tight stops to a system that lowered the expectation but increased the z-stat. All else being equal, what this result means is that the modification is superior, not inferior. The fact that it has a lower...

I feel that one danger in paper designing systems is to rely too strongly on assumptions of normal distribution. This is fine in most cases, but I feel that ideally you would want to preserve all characteristics of the underlying distribution, something best achieved by random sampling. In...

After a long tiring day of watching my pnl go back and forth, I often crave for some FPS action on Day of Defeat. Unfortunately after 7 hours of work and 2 hours of play in front of the same terminal, my eyes burn out. So I'm trying to cultivate physical activities to burn off the...

These comments are irrational. The objective is to compound wealth, the pleasure of working in your underwear from home should be a somewhat distant secondary objective. If your said 100,000 in trading profits comes as a result of compounding 50% on 200,000 then if all goes well you're...

Taxes are simple, it's someone else spending some of my money on my behalf. I earn $1 of which say 60 cents I retain spending discretion on and 40 cents I assign that spending discretion to the government. Assuming the government did such an incredible job with spending my money that I am...

It's painting the tape and it's as old as the hills. I'm no lawyer so I don't know which law it flouts, but I'll reckon a good guess is that it's illegal under market manipulation.

I think where there is much more overlap is what the best prop traders are doing and what the best "stat arb" types are doing. But quantitative types are a minority in the hedge fund world. Long short is the representative majority.

I don't think you get my point - the "typical" hedge fund employee is engaged in an activity that is designed to return 15% on hundreds of millions of dollars. The "typical" successful prop trader is engaged in an activity that is designed to work on millions of dollars at the most. There...

The skill sets required for a typical daytrader and a typical front line employee at a hedge fund are completely different, and the two worlds rarely intersect. As such, most comparisons between them are meaningless in the sense that there are few to zero hedge fund employees asking...