Ask HN: HN for Finance?
Love Hacker News.
But, is there one for Finance?
Not: seekingalpha, wilmott, zerohedge, etc.
Here's a Hacker News lookalike [1] for Machine Learning. You'll see that the latest post was 11 days ago, and the one before that 29 days ago and the one before 54. Most topics have one or zero comments. And ML is a much more popular topic than finance.
The great thing about HN is that it does not restrict the topics. People can bring up anything they find interesting. As soon as you want to limit the discussion to some specific thing, the audience drops by a few orders of magnitude.
So, I guess it's up to you to collect a number of different blogs and newsletter and follow them.
It almost goes without saying that you should subscribe to Matt Levine's newsletter [2]. Also, you can't go wrong by checking the blog of "Fed Guy" [3].
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
It looks like the main feed of DataTau (https://datatau.net/) may not be promoting posts from the "new" feed (https://datatau.net/new) aggressively enough. There are a few dozen new posts in just the last few days. I understand the dilemma with promoting posts before they have activity, but maybe the algorithm needs to be tweaked.
"Buy Women's Leggings, Sports Tops, jeans & jeggings in Online at - Zeneleggings"
What sort of isolated bubble do you live in to spit out stuff like that? xD
ML is a niche topic in a niche field (AI) itself in a relatively niche field (CS), itself in a broader topic (Tech).
Finance is at least as big as tech. Saying it's less popular than ML simply makes no sense.
Holy SV-bubble moly, I don't think that's true, maybe not even in SV itself.
Two quick comparisons:
- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Finance,... (Finance VS Machine Learning)
- https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Finance%... (Finance News VS Machine Learning News)
Even when comparing the region where "Machine Learning" is the most popular (South Korea), it ends up being 18% / 82% for "Finance". Or comparing the most popular city (Sunnyvale) it ends up being 14% / 86% for "Finance".
Not only is finance both a deeper and wider subject than machine learning, but also most people know that finance exists one way or another, while most people in the world probably haven't even heard about machine learning.
I agree, it probably isn't. Much is up to the people who chose to submit (quality) content and then moderation. Won't matter if the topic is the most popular one on Earth.
Well, clearly that’s not true, unless you have a very narrow definition of finance.
For the uninitiated bogleheads are followers of the passive investment philosophy of John Bogle (founder of Vanguard) which in short is:
1. Set a standing order from your paycheck to your broker every month
2. Set an automatic buy of a total market ETF and a bond ETF on your broker
3. rebalance once or twice a year
A lot of Reddit seems like that.
Maybe the answer is for each link or topic or submission to have multiple comment pages, and make it significantly more likely for people to find themselves back in old conversations. The way reddit locks discussion after a time frame makes this all but impossible though.
I've learned that maintaining even the simplest "strategy" can be a lot of work.
https://community.rationalreminder.ca/login
It started as a landing pad for listeners of the rational reminder podcast.
This forum increased my financial literacy by an order of magnitude.
If somebody is telling you that you should do something without knowing anything about your personal financial circumstances or appetite for risk, then they should be ignored.
It is equally unlikely that you will be willing to sufficiently disclose your financial circumstances to unknown individuals in order to receive any sort of worthwhile advice.
The above advice applies across the spectrum, whether it's the usual crowd blindly saying "buy a passive ETF and forget about it" or pump & dumpers saying "buy XYZ shares because its the next ten bagger".
There are lots of people on the internet putting out super valuable insight and/or trying to educate the unsophisticated masses. Putting out a blanket statement perpetuates this myth that finance is only for professionals, just like coding.
The culture of open source has led to high-trust collaboration in the software community. While anything involving money attracts grifters and scammers, that doesn't mean that there aren't honest and open people out there giving away gifts.
Much like you shouldn't just blindly execute random code on your machine from an untrusted individual on your computer, you shouldn't just blindly open a position on something without thinking hard about the decision for yourself.
The ethos of your average tech/nerd produces things like HN, and as much as there's a lot of bad things with it ( and there are many ), the uber nerds, the aggressive new genius kids invent their own revolutionary tech just to be pointed out by the old "been there done that" guy, the "I just build this over the weekend", the business guy under heavy tech bro camouflage waiting for his moment, the holy OSS priests and I could go on and on.. All these people AND context ( aka huge influx of cheap/free money ) make HN what it is.
Finance has their own figures, groups, context and ethos and it isn't anything like HN. Yes, there is a lot of money talk here because.. business. But if you spend 5min around finance people the conversations are very different ( not alien, bu t different ) and of course tech people with money want to get more money so they talk with finance people and a little SV secret that everybody knows is that in the last decade most "tech" companies exist because the finance and MBA guys came to SV to write checks and earn their money.
But the 2 worlds are different and you cannot replicate what one has.
Tech is big, but it's really small compared to finance and if we complain about the deluge of pretenders when some new hot tech goes mainstream, in finance it's 1000% worse ( one example: Crypto )
Best is to follow people who are speaking in precise technical details where you're not the audience. A bit like software engineers talking to each other: speaking in precise technical terms, assuming a reasonable amount of background knowledge. AKA professionals
Then do your own work to clue yourself up on the nomenclature and basics
Twitter / FinTwit is the best
Level of discussion is not always great but I find its way better than anywhere else. Twitter Spaces usually have great discussions since people are less likely to troll vs tweets.
One thing I've found though is if the person is getting too cocky and going on victory laps, it's pretty much always a good time to counter trade them.
You'll be able to find some great Substack's, Podcasts, Youtube channels from Twitter as well if you're following the right people.
Some that I follow
- @fedguy12 - macro
- @JulianMI2 - macro
- @biancoresearch - macro
- @acrossthespread - Japan macro
- @anasalhajji - energy
- Pretty much any central bank, government official
- Fund managers. Many of them aren't too active and just crosspost links to videos. Cliff Asness is one that is active though
- Forward Guidance
- Odd Lots
HN is still way better than Reddit on the rare finance/economics post. Every finance thread you'll get a few people who have unique insights/opinions but I think the majority is still a lot of retail market participants who just regurgitate the Reddit stuff.
Anyway, I don't think it's realistic to become good at trading/investment while working in a different profession. Be prepared to drop everything and focus on it full time (after a few years of preliminary study) if you're really serious. The learning curve is a lot worse than tech, and it's not just because there are no tutorials to learn from. The level of competition is completely different.
There are many armchair economists here, mostly with a pure software dev outlook on the topic. People who've never taken a single class about finance confidently chime in with some of the worst takes I've ever heard.
They seem to think that because they're good at programming, they must therefore be masters of all studies, since STEM majors are often harder to get accepted into. This is a logical fallacy, and it's pretty tiring.
The best use of CS knowledge is knowing how to avoid the quant trading herd.
failing that, getting an RSS feed of a wires service that got a good finance section (Reuters or Bloomberg.)
Update: it was called newmogul.
For finance itself r/finance has some good posts on occasion, and there is an insurance professional forum which can be useful for those products, but not one all encompassing board.
In the submission there was a mention of "HN for business" as well (http://forlue.com), but that links to some ad-infested abomination now.
Value spreads are at an all time wide (measure by a valuation ratio eg P/E or EV/EBIT of expensive vs. cheap parts of a wide group of stocks), and to get to that point value strategies have had to underperform for a long time.
If you believe in mean reversion you would believe that value strategies are going to outperform and the quality of writeup on Value Investors Club will improve as well.
EconTwitter.net, which is a Mastodon.
Subscribe to various REPEC bots, of which there are a few for various flavours of finance http://nep.repec.org/
Otherwise, maybe a Bloomberg terminal, though it's out of reach for most people. The high price to entry is a feature, not a bug.
primarily legal tech, OSS ideology, developments, ?
Oh, sure there are "sophisticated" day traders, but those are just fodder for the Wall Street casino.
The closest to really hacking finance was (the horror, the horror) the cryptofinance lot, but this has degenerated quickly into a rob-thy-neighbor ponzi scheme.
As just one example, you can securitize the revenues from golf courses. You can say, hey, i own six courses bringing in an average of $100m a year. I'm gonna take that $600m cash flow and sell it in an asset-backed security in order to raise money to finance the acquisition of more golf courses. Then I'm gonna tranche up those securities, because I found that I'll make more money selling 50% super safe and 50% risky than selling it as 100% middle-of-the-road risky. This example isn't really a hack anymore... it's almost the norm. But someone had to have the initial insight and then figure out if this was legal.
But this brings to a second peculiarity of the financial world of today that makes it less fitting for an open discussion forum of (aspiring) fin-techies like HN. Its very proprietary, secretive and dominated by a few megaplayers (pick any subdomain: banking, asset management, trading platforms, credit ratings, credit scoring etc. there is some oligopoly milking it and they are not about to open it up to random DIY hackers)
One area that was quite intriguing for a while and maybe conducive to a more decentralized discourse (but predictably hasn't gone anywhere) is peer-to-peer lending.
p.s. my parent comment is downvoted even if it is about the only one in this thread that doesn't pitch some stonks forum or another. Alas, the milking machine is well oiled...
My point is here: https://youtu.be/_8yVOC4ciXc?t=696 - they explain that gpt3 (almost) learned how to add and multiply, but they don't know how. To me that's the thing. (the insight comes at 12:29, 15:23)
in a sense that is kind of an admission that we don't know what the heck what is going on. That's kind of stronger than the claim to "strong AI".
Being able to define a system as being as a "Strong Ai" assumes that we would still know hat is actually going on. An understanding of what is going on would imply a claim of understanding of what is happening, that in turn implies a claim of being in charge of show.
(Maybe that's a cyperpunk way of looking at the whole frigging show ;-)
The "Fruitarians" already have their tight communities. Everyone who wanted to be in such a community is there already, not dumbly questioning on HN.