indeed. i suppose i should clarify a bit -- advice given to YC companies and similar companies should be treated as such -- advice for companies on the YC company-like path, not as universal gospel, and i believe he's made that distinction in the past.
I hate to do this, but I'm going to quote the guidelines at you:
"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."
Preceden's my work and if their design was based on mine, I don't mind at all. I tend to base my initial designs on sites that look aesthetically pleasing to me and then adjust it over time to be my own. The dark blue header, for example, was inspired by http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/. I'm sure they're doing something similar.
Thank you for the kind wishes! We looked all over the place for inspiration for our site. Though the resemblence here is just a coincidence, clearly we like your style.
See btilly's comment that mentions them. There is a lot of chatter about bankruptcy. It's still just chatter, with a small number of exceptions. Let us all hope it stays that way.
Mind you, I'm not guaranteeing they'll all go away, but it won't take very many bankruptcies for your returns to go below inflation. (Or worse.)
I might invest in specific municipalities, if that's possible for a mere mortal investor, but I wouldn't think it's necessarily a safer assert class than anything else right now.
Here's one recent link (far from the only long-form article I've read; reminds me of some of the articles I read before the tech and housing bubbles burst):
I have a feeling this article confused the creators of the trading algorithms, which is what makes the money, with pure programmers, who are hired to implement someone else's pre-existing algorithms.
Sometimes these are the same person, but in those cases that person almost always has a profit sharing contract, not only a base salary. (And if they don't, they're crazy.) The fact that the programmers in the article only had base salaries leads me to believe that they weren't the actual creators of the trading algorithms, so they don't really deserve a slice of the profits anyway, because someone else a) created the profit machine and b) is taking all the risks of running it.
What really happens is that these programmer guys learn the trading secrets after a few years on the job, then depart to a different firm to recreate the machine themselves. There's no oppression or revolts here.
HFT algorithms aren't that complex. When it comes to finding the differences of pricing between two brokers buying from the cheapest and selling to most expensive, there's no need for an advanced pricer (and there's no time anyway).
The difficulty of HFT is designing a machine that can trade fast enough. I'm not sure you realize how difficult this is. You just can't take a quant and make him an über C++ programmer overnight.
There's a reason why you need people with different skills to make money, and the reason is that becoming really skilled in whatever field takes years.
Good companies pay everyone making a direct contribution to the profit a fair share, those who don't lose their talents.
Have you actually done any HFT work? I know that's what most people believe, but the HFT outfits I am familiar with have algorithms that are extremely complex, and while they need to be fast, just being faster than them with a dumb algorithm won't get you anywhere.
FWIW I am an HF Programmer Trader, (Jeff Gomberg's Business Partner / Fellow Programmer actually) In certain cases being dumb and fast will get you very far. For example, with an arbitrage strategy, being able to get the arbitrage faster than someone else will make a lot of money and it is all about speed. It is that simple. The problem is that going that fast is very expensive (depending on the trade), so you have to be smart and decide if you can or can't get the other side of the arb in time, and it spirals on from there. But if you were the fastest being smart is less important and vice versa.
That's an easy problem to solve. The people with the trading algorithms can just learn to program. No worries about programmers stealing trading secrets that way.
HFT financial engineers can not necessarily learn software engineering in their operating time-frames. There is no "High Frequency Learning"; by the time they learn to configure a development environment they could have lost the edge.
It's a lot easier for a good programmer to learn how to trade than for a good trader to learn how to be a programmer. Though most programmers make terrible traders and most traders make terrible programmers. A lot of depends on the company you are at, the more foresighted ones, were grooming guys for this role 5-10 years ago. And more importantly establishing a tradition of `trade developers.` Typically though the traders that become good enough programmers took an engineering discipline in college. Also, some of them are just so smart / driven that coding something good enough to make money is something they trudge through, but their code usually the ugliest thing you'd ever see this side of php.
Of course, but the traders are taking risks in the sense that they can get fired for losing money. Programmers generally won't. They have a lower-risk, more secure job.
That's different. The security is: if a programmer implements the code correctly, but the market turns against the strategy and the strategy loses money, the programmer generally won't lose his job.
Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.
