Thank goodness for that. They also won't ever have to learn how to use a sliderule or kill a woolly mammoth with a spear. Instead they can focus on the things that add value in today's economy, which is much more about about a good GUI and intuitive design than squeezing the most you can out of limited computing resources. For sure we still need a few hardware folks and people who can write in assembly, in fact that's what the smart kids these days do for fun just for the challenge of it. But just because something is hard doesn't make it valuable and just because we have good tools doesn't make the use of those tools laziness. In fact I'd be a little pissed if my developers were reinventing the wheel and not using all the tools available to them as well as surfing GitHub and Stackoverflow all the time to see if someone's already done the heavy lift for something they're working on.
Is working Asian hours that bad?
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I agree with you 100%. Things are also more difficult nowadays in different ways. It is now much harder to prove that you can go above and beyond everyone else in a technical sense. Back in the day simply owning a computer made you "technical". You are right, no need to reinvent the wheel. Everyone has to deal with current standards, I just wanted to travel back in time for a moment.
Just a side note, I wish people would share stories of what it was like to trade from home pre-internet. I have heard crazy things about people getting realtime quotes with a satellite dish on their house or in their back yard. This dish must be pointed towards the southern sky. I have heard things like people waiting 15 minutes or longer to get a phone call back from a broker to confirm a "fill price" from the pit. How were futures daytrading margins pre-internet??? The Eminis were not around yet so if you had a low bankroll you needed to trade through the MidAM (Mid American Commodity Exchange) right? What about if you wanted to trade an equity futures index but didn't have the bankroll??? Was the Kansas City Value Line the thing to trade???
How the hell did people daytrade from home pre-internet? Was the only way to daytrade pre-internet by hanging around in a broker's office? I know Livermore did that but I wonder more about pre-internet short term futures trading????? The hurdles back from 1993 and before that sound crazy to me.
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I intentionally gave the headhunter a rather vague description. My business is not latency sensitive, so I don't need a hard-core programmer. An ideal candidate would be someone with a working knowledge of python, some C++ (our internal execution engine requires some of that), background in statistics and solid understanding of the options theory. At the same time, it has to be someone who will work hard and someone I can get along with. This said, I know that people like that are hard to find and thus, so the expectation is that I would take someone that lacks in background and educate them. The personality traits are non-negotiable, of course - I don't have the patience or time to deal with a personality conflict.
It takes me a lot of effort to grok someones personalty, so every candidate was a massive time investment. There's the initial chat, then 3-4 follow-up meetings, then a dinner/drinks to have a pre-offer conversation and only then I was ready to commit. After all, this will be the person I'll be spending a lot of time with and, ideally, our relationship will go beyond the current place of employment.
It's still there. Most libs are pretty poorly documented, and many have documentation that is actively misleading. There are even some amazing libs like Pandas that have an immense volume of documentation that all has a very tiny signal-to-noise ratio! And of course there are always the libs that are well documented but designed in a way that maximizes your WTFs/hour, like the IB API.
Funny story: when I was an undergraduate (not that long ago) we had to use ML-yacc not because it was the best tool for the job but because it had garbage documentation and being able to deal with garbage documentation was a valid skill to learn.
As someone who is trading from 10:30pm to 5:15am now, those hours seem fantastic.
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I am doing that because I am in Hawaii - so the hours are perfect. Yes, I think it's an edge for both swing and intra-day moves because a lot of the big reversal rallies start in these hours. You can play the stock Indices rotation game - Big down session in the US, than Asia trend down from the open to close, than Europe open later and does the same. The other advantage is your trading during the overlap of Asia & Europe and foreign currencies prime time- which is the larger market. The Asia markets are still mostly human driven - you get cleaner price patterns to trade from - more directional, slower corrections - clean continuation patterns. You can follow the stop picking on the Indices futures when a multi day or week range sets up, if your into that type of thing. Day trading was cool in the 90's - many of the savvy types switched to the night session to regain an edge of sorts. When the US day crowd wakes up to a big gap - you bet it has been front run by us night owls. Some year most of the market gains are on the ETH session, the price ranges are great unlike years ago. Recommendation - via Interactive Brokers you can add the Singapore exchange for only $2 month - I trade China, Singapore. , Taiwan, and India from it and Europe via another broker for lower rates. These are break out markets - not sideways sleepers, so do join the party
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyla...the-cool-kids-are-night-trading/#4b2b1b4b7a4c
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I am doing that because I am in Hawaii - so the hours are perfect. Yes, I think it's an edge for both swing and intra-day moves because a lot of the big reversal rallies start in these hours. You can play the stock Indices rotation game - Big down session in the US, than Asia trend down from the open to close, than Europe open later and does the same. The other advantage is your trading during the overlap of Asia & Europe and foreign currencies prime time- which is the larger market. The Asia markets are still mostly human driven - you get cleaner price patterns to trade from - more directional, slower corrections - clean continuation patterns. You can follow the stop picking on the Indices futures when a multi day or week range sets up, if your into that type of thing. Day trading was cool in the 90's - many of the savvy types switched to the night session to regain an edge of sorts. When the US day crowd wakes up to a big gap - you bet it has been front run by us night owls. Some year most of the market gains are on the ETH session, the price ranges are great unlike years ago. Recommendation - via Interactive Brokers you can add the Singapore exchange for only $2 month - I trade China, Singapore. , Taiwan, and India from it and Europe via another broker for lower rates. These are break out markets - not sideways sleepers, so do join the party
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilyla...the-cool-kids-are-night-trading/#4b2b1b4b7a4c
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Very interesting observation. Thanks for the chart.
LOL I didn't even see the page with the video! For what its worth, I regularly make fun of that sensitive crowd as well hahaYou have to admit, that video was funny as shit. The first time I watched it I choked on my water.
Wow, big change! Good luck, different service but having done my 20 as a helicopter pilot I'm happy to answer any questions you have if you want to PM me.