ryankennedyio

I don't know why this is being downvoted, because it is quite accurate.

Jesse Eisinger's "The Chickenshit Club" - is a book written entirely about the OP subject. I remember a podcast with the author, and this was a key point.

This is a handy pocket guide. Quite seriously, start looking around if your gut is telling you to.

http://wiki.c2.com/?WarningSignsOfCorporateDoom

To be honest after one semester, I can't eloquently state it without rambling for a few hours, so I'll direct to this excellent HN comment, which does a much better job than I could:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14286604

It will depend a lot on your field, but a solid grasp of fundamental probability theory should be applicable everywhere.

I think this is an excellent overview [1]. Learning probability from a measure theory angle is more difficult to grok compared to the frequentist approach everyone is more familiar with, but I found it much more enjoyable. (I learnt the usual way from doing computer science undergrad, but now re-doing it more rigorously for masters in financial engineering)

[1]: http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/index.html

Just for a reference point on how ridiculous Sydney is; $4,900,000 AUD will buy you this[1] about 50 minutes from the CBD.

The mortgage loan book of the 4 major banks here is hovering at about 50% interest-only loans. Nearly 1 in 3 people lie on their mortgage application too [2].

[1] https://www.domain.com.au/26-south-street-strathfield-nsw-21... [2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-07/mortgage-fraud-systemi...

I think this is a sound, critical review of the Black Swan & Taleb in general. Funnily enough, the criticisms of him are more relevant/prominent now than nearly a decade ago when this was written.

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/review-of-talebs-b...

For good reason, crowdfunding is really quite terrible (not the kickstarter kind):

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-07/you-too-c...

This guy [1] has written a neat post on generating option data from historic raw data. Would be quite interesting to compare the results on 1-minute data compared to raw prices. It seems OK for longer holding periods, where you'd mostly look to use options as directional leverage on underlying large caps.

[1]: http://www.financial-hacker.com/algorithmic-options-trading/

I grew up in Cairns & think that's a big part of why I'm so fascinated with marine life. I can happily spend a day watching almost any fish tank. My girlfriend has to drag me out of aquariums every time. It completely crushes me to think my (future) kids might not ever know what it was like.

I thoroughly urge anyone in the world with the means to do so, to visit and experience it.

Smallcap market here is fun (read: it's pretty stupid). Otherwise, I'm just more used to reading Australian news, more local people on twitter, etc. It's just more in my 'sphere', and I know a lot more about the local companies than I do about the U.S. counterparts.

I have an IB account, but even setting that up to trade properly requires owning a company. I did wake up early and trade the US options market a little while ago & that was pretty great. Might play with some algorithmic stuff I have that works on the ASX, but on the US, just need a load more data.

True, I forgot about the extra monthly fees -- though you can just use free, 20 minute delayed data. I also forgot that the US is so cheap -- I pay $6 each way with IB on the ASX.

Does Robinhood sell retail order flow on? I've read conflicting views both ways, but can't really see how they'd make any money if they didn't.

I think the way it's being promoted is a bit dangerous though. It seems like they're promoting to the exact market that really, really shouldn't be flipping stocks (and promoting use of margin to do so). Interactive brokers is what, a few bucks a trade anyway?

Something aimed at a similar market that I like a lot more is 'acorns'. It just rounds up any transaction you make to some number, and invests the difference in one of a few ETFs. I think it promotes a much healthier view of investing for the average young joe/jill.

I moved to Sydney 3 months ago (from interstate) to study and pursue a slightly different line of work. I don't think I'll ever be able to own a house anywhere closer than 20+km to the CBD unless prices come down at least 30%. Rents seem higher than Chicago, comparable to parts of NY, and wages seem to be a lot lower (anecdata though).

If I want to build a decent nest-egg it's likely going to require spending a considerable amount of time overseas. That said, healthcare and affordable education is pretty cool.

I don't think any retailer can trade on the scale and speed that would require C/C++ over Python. With lower capital and significantly higher transaction costs, retail traders (mostly) need to have holding periods for at least hours, so speed isn't really an issue. It's more about finding longer term anomalies to deploy maybe at most a few dozen positions, as opposed to reacting to billions of quotes over any trading day.

I think Python is a great tool for finance, particularly with libraries like Pandas, Numpy, etc. Most of the work in those libraries is C/Fortan/etc anyway. Great community. For more 'academic' style work/exploration, I think R might have an edge, but I personally find it more difficult to write and maintain high quality code in R.

I'd like to just throw a quick plug in for an open source project I'm working on [1]. It's an event-driven trading library written in Python. We're pretty close to having live trade execution ready in an alpha state.

The motivation is that you can put together a pretty simply strategy in ~40 lines of code. The codebase is designed to be pretty flexible & modular. Mike from http://quantstart.com has some great resources & many of his recent articles use the same library.

[1]: https://github.com/mhallsmoore/qstrader

Bloomberg LP makes roughly 8 billion in revenue from selling their terminal to 300,000 subscribers (25,000 per annum).

I feel like the Bloomberg magazine is just a way to reinforce their status as the top disseminator of financial news, so that financial firms don't really think of the other options when looking for new data/terminal subscriptions, because Bloomberg is always "there".

Strange model. It's kind of like, a pretty high quality product you get for free, paid for by the people who purchase the really-really-expensive product.

You jest, but that method literally works. I'm trying to break into finance, from a programming, web-development kind of background (with CS degree), which is a pretty tough nut to crack.

I've had a great deal of success just reaching out to people on LinkedIn who've worked on cool stuff in areas I find interesting, message them to see if they're keen to meet for a coffee/beer/etc. Meetups are fun too. A good number of people are happy to just chat for 30min, and you might get a few pointers on where to look for what you want. The worst case outcome is that you meet someone new, and talk about things you find mutually interesting for a little while.

Learn kdb+/q, move into trading, be lucky.

Buzzfeed does some surprisingly impressive investigative journalism:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/markschoofs/21-explosive-investigat...

The Tennis Racket was one of my favourite reads of the year.

(of course, it still has a clickbait headline)

The downvotes say it all, but don't ever write naked options. The strategy has positive expectancy, except every few years you lose >100% of capital, since the risk is almost unbounded.

Location may be highly relevant too.

Works fine on chrome/OSX for me. Make sure you went to the right page (hangover things, not the girl doing yoga)

Really, really great idea. This would be an absolutely fantastic addition to something like instagram.

I agree. I've done the bare minimum math needed for comp sci (1st year calc + basic probability/stats). Barely passed. In preparation for masters in financial engineering next year I've gone back to basics, worked through his calc 1 & 2 (3 todo) videos and I'm amazed at how much I enjoy math now. Thoroughly enjoy how he teaches the content -- the enthusiasm is really infectious.

Does anyone have suggestions on exercise material? I spend some time with Wolfram generated problems every few days and am working through two textbooks, but just wondering what other people find helpful.