Traders with Pockets Full of Crypto Quit Wall Street | Hacker News Reader

Traders with Pockets Full of Crypto Quit Wall Street

bloomberg.com

50 pointslnguyen28 comments

>he invested all the savings he had available from six years working for an investment consultancy in Northern England, or 10,000 pounds ($13,250)

He saved just $180 per month?

>he said Ether cost about $10 when he invested

So he got lucky by buying in early... not because of successful trading. Yet he gives advice as if he was an expert trader.

There’s a lot of that on Wall Street too.

Classic Whataboutism/Tu quoque.

Bingo; if you’ve ever met successful traders they’re usually not that smart. Most were just in the right place at the right time.

They try to justify their exceptionalism by giving advice, but it boils down to “be a WASP and get a job at an investment bank”.

I suggest you go on a trading floor and revisit your wasp comment.

There's no trading floor any more, mate. Well at the very least said floor is a quiet place. Its all hft and electronic trading these days.

There’s always the exception that proves the rule, but yeah it’s pretty waspy once you move a level above the kids hired out of university.

To be fair, "buy and hold" is probably one of the best investment advice there is.

All companies go bust. Won't you lose all your money that way?

That's why you don't put all your eggs in the same basket.

Not strictly true. Large traded S&P/FTSE companies are more likely to get bought out then fail outright.

To follow up this question: Isn't that just a gamble too? I buy a company at 10, it goes up to 20, should I get out? I think it will get to 30, the next day it goes to 2 and soon delisted.

I can vouch, I have done this. I have no idea what I am doing.

If you buy at 10 and it goes to 20, sell half and play with house money if you are worried about it.

No, that's like saying all lineages die out; there's no reason a company shouldn't continue operating profitably indefinitely.

Who mentioned "should"?

In theory, companies pay dividends, and the price of a stock is effectively the time-discounted value of all future payments (including any final sale).

Separating that from the “bitcoin” part of a stock’s price is, of course, the major question.

> He saved just $180 per month?

It's Northern England. he likely wasn't paid that much.

Lol if being a "successful trader" means I'm not allowed to buy assets at a great price then I never want to be a "successful trader".

> “You’ve seen a bifurcation internally at many larger houses where senior managers are very skeptical about crypto, while graduates and younger team members are very positive,” said Grimsley. “The youngsters may have less intellectual baggage and may be more open-minded, but they also have less responsibility for managing risk and working out the practicalities of bolting on crypto to the existing business.”

It's a very telling quote and you are left wondering to which extend bitcoin suffers from youthful exuberance instead of the sometimes boring pragmatism of making it profitable.

The universal single currency for a truly global and peaceful world is an intriguing prospect for many but we are so far politically it can’t enter the mainstream just now. It’s almost there technologically, though, so in the long run, maybe.

My hypothesis is that Goldman et al were only interested in crypto as a market-making opportunity. Crypto price manipulation fits right in with their commodity trading strategy (buy up most of the global supply and sit on it).

They made enough money in a volatile unregulated market that their salaries seem minuscule. So, they go and burn more of their money in the same volatile market at this time. What can go wrong?

May be they took some money out of their quick earned profits, and saved enough for their life. The rest is what they are going out to gamble with. Now that doesn't seem unreasonable.

Lottery winners quit day jobs

How do you trade crypto? I'm not well versed in this but find it fascinating. I mean, you can make a good profit of volatility on the way up but how do you profit when the markets are bearish? You go long/short on currency pairs? I bet there are dozens of different ways of profitably approaching these markets but I have no idea how people actually find a strategy and then decide to quit their jobs and day-trade all day every day without needing institutional money from accredited investors. Do you use machine learning to obtain insights that create those strategies?

If anyone knows good books on this subject, please do recommend them!

The brightest minds of our time dedicated to getting something for nothing while, according to recent statistics, nearly half of the American population has less than $400 in savings. Says everything about our sick society.

> The brightest minds of our time

Would you rather they went back to doing what they have been for the last 15 years? Pushing adverts and hoarding data.

Yes - if nothing else that burns much less of our limited energy supplies.

Are you aware that many coins don't involve mining the way that bitcoin does? There's more than one way to skin a cat with just about every aspect of crypto.

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