Why you should not learn to code

[ironchef]

I came to the conclusion that it was not possible to run any reasonable backtesting without writing my own programs to test various strategies and parameters optimization. So, I went back to school to learn VBA Excel and I will learn Python next.

Coding the strategy and running the program with the strategy allows me to stress test under various scenarios and give me a better understanding of the basic characteristics of the strategy. I could not do it with a canned program or screener from the brokerage.

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

OK so I watched it, he is obviously trolling a little bit but he makes good points:

- Soft skills are very important (I would say more important)
- A tech guy who "does not code anymore" as a status symbol: 100%.
- It's a very easy job lifestyle wise
- It's a mentally intense job
- People considering "software development not a real job" and salaries are too high (girls who code, learn 2 code, etc.)

Points where he is obviously trolling:
- The singularity
- Don't code if you like asserting dominance. I've actually worked with people like this, it's hilarious.

Overall, software has become inundated with people who are drawn to the money, which is fine, except they suck. I hate the industry.

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

This should be a must watch for every beginner. He committed almost every mistake there is in the beginning trader universe. The sad thing is that the human psyche is wired such that most who commit such mistakes actually keep on repeating them. They just can't help it. I see it over and over again, for example, how some keep on attempting to counter trends no matter how strong the trends. Or they are overleveraged. Or they only read and expose themselves to news that suits their Positions. Or they read biased news. Or they don't honor stop losses. The list goes on... that is why I believe the grand majority cannot learn to trade.

When discretionary trading what I do is take the full loss if I'm wrong as a forcing mechanism: I have to quantify my risk at the start of the trade. As a result, options are my tool of choice but my loss is limited from day 1. Usually get a few small losses and few large-ish wins. I've only been trading options for a few months now, but so far I'm net way positive (> 50% return so far).

Edit: also the main reason I like options is because stop losses are too binary for me.

 

[southall]

- Soft skills are very important (I would say more important)

To land a high paying coding job 'soft skills' don't really matter that much. But if you want to move up the career ladder they matter a lot.
I mean you can get a contract paying a $1000 a day based on mostly your hard skills and only average soft skills.
But to move up the career ladder you will need above average soft skills.

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

To land a high paying coding job 'soft skills' don't really matter that much. But if you want to move up the career ladder they matter a lot.
I mean you can get a contract paying a $1000 a day based on mostly your hard skills and only average soft skills.
But to move up the career ladder you will need above average soft skills.

$1000/day isn't that great for (edit: wasting 8 hours of your life) dealing with "agile" meetings and stupid people.

 

[southall]

$1000/day isn't that great for (edit: wasting 8 hours of your life) dealing with "agile" meetings and stupid people.

I recently got back into IT after 10 years.
All this Agile stuff was new to me. It was around 10 years ago but not to the level it is used today. It took me a while to get used to.
Once i had proven myself, which took about 3 months. I didn't have to follow this stupid Agile stuff anymore. They are so impressed by my development skills they just let me get on with it. All the Agile meetings suddenly became optional for me. I think Agile is mainly needed to allocate and manage work for junior developers or for senior developers who have become lazy and need a regular push.

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

I recently got back into IT after 10 years.
All this Agile stuff was new to me. It was around 10 years ago but not to level it is today. It took a while to get used to.
Once i had proven myself, which took about 3 months. I didn't have to follow this stupid Agile stuff anymore. They are so impressed by my skills they just let me get on with it. All the Agile meetings suddenly became optional for me. I think Agile is mainly needed to allocate and manage work for junior or lazy developers.

Yeah that's my backup plan but so far haven't needed to take advantage of it. What did you do in the between working in IT?

 

[zdave83]

I came to the conclusion that it was not possible to run any reasonable backtesting without writing my own programs to test various strategies and parameters optimization. ............ Coding the strategy and running the program with the strategy allows me to stress test under various scenarios and give me a better understanding of the basic characteristics of the strategy. I could not do it with a canned program or screener from the brokerage.

Agreed, I found the same thing ... in the middle 90's. Used MS Visual Basic (VB6) which was innovative and widely used at the time in combination with Excel, which continues to be the Swiss Army knife of dashboard tools, graphing and financial/statistical functions. Still use Excel and system components I originally wrote long ago in VB6/VBA for datastore, ingesting data, analysis & environment management. As they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Once data management was in place, over time it seemed like it was no more efficient to create/code strategies in other company's applications ... even the newer web-based environments.

More recently using VB.net with IB/TWS API's to expand system capabilities to include automated order placement and order management, which is really helpful in trading large baskets of options. VB.net/VisualStudio also has ML tools and integration with Azure, which is supposed to be capable of adding huge "cloud-based" CPU resources to my existing strategy testing ecosystem. We'll see

 

[nooby_mcnoob]

Agreed, I found the same thing ... in the middle 90's. Used MS Visual Basic (VB6) which was innovative and widely used at the time in combination with Excel, which continues to be the Swiss Army knife of dashboard tools, graphing and financial/statistical functions. Still use Excel and system components I originally wrote long ago in VB6/VBA for datastore, ingesting data, analysis & environment management. As they say, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Once data management was in place, over time it seemed like it was no more efficient to create/code strategies in other company's applications ... even the newer web-based environments.

More recently using VB.net with IB/TWS API's to expand system capabilities to include automated order placement and order management, which is really helpful in trading large baskets of options. VB.net/VisualStudio also has ML tools and integration with Azure, which is supposed to be capable of adding huge "cloud-based" CPU resources to my existing strategy testing ecosystem. We'll see

Regarding swiss army knife of dashboard tools, I'm starting to become partial to Jupyter & Python for the same reason. I have various alerts set up during the week which launch a specific Jupyter notebook, that evaluates against my homebuilt data/trading platform, to inform a discretionary trade. Every time I have an idea, I code it up in Jupyter, set an alarm to check every X days whether to enter or not. It's pretty fun.

I tried to do this in a spreadsheet, but I use Linux and LibreOffice is a nightmare. Jupyter is nice and lightweight.

Try it out.

 

[southall]

What did you do in the between working in IT?

You shouldn't need to ask on a trading board.
I was a full time trader for 8 years. Then i went back part time into IT for 2 years, now full time IT.
After about 5 years I hit a slow period in my trading wasn't losing money but wasn't making enough either, just slowly sucking money out of my account for living expenses.

After being a full time trader for 8 years. Nothing in the corporate IT world can demoralise me any more. Its all a cake walk in comparison. I see some guys in the office demoralised, with the same behaviour and attitude patterns that i used to have 10 years ago.