RookyNumbas

I don't disagree with anything you've written. But if you name a strategy, I can make a case for why it's providing liquidity.

On the one extreme, some firms truly are paid to make liquidity. This is the basis of the maker-taker model. I think Rentech is at the other end of the spectrum.

These eggheads (very) occasionally move to other firms and see similar returns. Of course rentech then sues those other firms for all the profits they make. And they win.

The medallion fund had 20 years of performance before the other funds existed.

James Simons had a funds for tech startups. But it wasn't nearly large enough to support the kind of profits that happened.

This would only explain the performance for the last 10 years. There were no "sucker" funds for the first 20.

No, the medallion fund existed for 20 years before these other funds were opened.

I'm not sure how accurate this tactical liquidity picture is, at least for much of medallion's history. For a good portion of their existence they called in all their trades twice a day. Them being fairly late to the automated trading game was one of the the surprises from the book for me. Any "HFT" as mentioned in the article is not done by renaissance, but through execution services.

The big picture seems to be statistical arbitrage done with extreme precision and leveraged to a massive scale. Add in some quasi-legal agreements with banks, and likely tax-fraud, they are able to do this at a magnitude no one else can.

Which games we selectively care about are a result of our values. So our ranking of the importance of games mimics our value hierarchy. Christianity provides a value structure with a clear "Top", and the instructions to organize our ranking of games in accordance.

And while not religious, I also believe that they've got this right.

Right. There isn't one game, there are infinitely many, and different people will have success at different games.

But there is also the meta-game: The game of being able to win the highest variety and largest amount of different games. I think this meta-game is closest to what we think of as status.

What you're describing is more like general uncertainty of the future. Procrastination is when those uncertainties have collapsed into pressing realities that need to be handled. And then you don't do them anyways.

Putting off learning a new framework because you're not sure if it will be useful isn't really procrastination. Not preparing for your interview tomorrow is.

This seems correct to me. The last two things I've learned were javscript/node/react and Haskell. I had never touched js or html before, but within two days I had a pretty decent web app up and running. It was something that could (and did) provided value for a business.

Two days after starting Haskell I had essentially nothing to show for it except a feeling that I has a huge amount to learn before I could be productive. Even a year later I still have a huge amount to learn.

That's true. Except when interviewers see your profile and they suddenly care a lot about the hacky code you wrote at 3am on a saturday for fun. sigh...

You've listed a handful of funds that have good PR, which are the only ones software guys have heard of. They are a fraction of the total buy side. This would be like saying Yahoo, Uber, Google and Cisco represent the entire tech industry.

When the S&P500 is up 25+%, there is a staggeringly large amount of money paid out in bonuses.

This analysis is continuously being done. You can find it for your country easily. In most developed countries a ~5% gap exists. This is usually attributed to men being more aggressive in negotiations.

Your first paragraph has been the goto defense for VR for a decade now. I used it myself five years ago. But it's gotten old now. Tech is supposed to solve these problems faster than this.

The Valve index sold out because it is the only way to play one of the most anticipated games of all time.

I feel somewhat sorry for the author. He ends the post with the realization that the search for success has not turned out like he was led to believe, and then questions how he should proceed with life.

My advice would be to go make pasta and share it with a beautiful woman (or man in his case).

Do you know if these measurements were possible in the past, and no one thought of doing them? Or are they only recently possible, enabled by new technology?

Are you saying meditation doesn't work? Or just prayer?

Remember that both prayer and meditation mean very different things to different people. I used to be quick to dismiss prayer until I talked to more people about it and found that what they were doing was quite similar to my meditation habits.

Bloom was famous for his reading speed and memory: 400 pages an hour for simpler material, and could recite most of Shakespeare's works word by word. For us mortals the canon is meant to take a lifetime to read.

I agree. Activism, Politics, Inter-governmental cooperation and policies will not be what alleviates the dangers of climate change. A few major technological breakthroughs will rock the world and we will be having a much different discussion in 20 years.

The area we will struggle with the most is fixing what we've done to our oceans.

Australia is always on fire. More of has burnt many times, many decades ago.

I'm not saying that climate change isn't responsible. I do believe that it has increased the severity of the situation, and that is a big problem. But this is not a doomsday scenario. It's a once every 20 years going back as long as we can measure scenario.

I think your reaction is a perfect example of what the parent comment is talking about.

Yes, empathetic 1:1 conversation is critical, and yes you can have a huge impact on those around you. But this has nothing to do with keeping up to date with news. Facts will not change your racist uncle's opinion. 99% of the news you consume will have absolutely 0 effect on your ability to convince others to be better.

Develop a vision for your life. Become an expert in topics that are important to you. Read good books, befriend interesting people, and focus on problems where you can make a large difference, and inspire others to do so as well. Daily news plays no role in this.

Hedge Funds have always paid quants significantly better.

In the past decade or so many banks have built out their engineering teams. Goldman is now 25% engineers. More recently these banks have started to compete with hedge funds for the same quant talent that can better take advantage of their new technical prowess. But the comparatively strict compensation structure still means you can make a lot more on the buy side.