secretasiandan

I'm not sure what maleness has to do with this. The issue is there is a class of people who are, relatively speaking, much better at something than other classes.

I'm tempted to say that the author is not suggesting that there is a proactive push on his company's part to take advantage of this disparity. You could argue that they are by lowballing everyone, but some fraction of the people end up taking the job so it must not be a totally bad deal for those who take the job and fail to push the lowball offer higher

My question is, what do you feel is to be done about situations like this? In particular, at what level should society act to 'right' the situation?

Edit : by disparity, I mean the gender disparity : There is not a proactive effort to get women to accept lower salaries.

If they succeed, it will mean the financial transaction space is truly becoming efficient. At $.25/transaction and an average transaction size of $500, that means a charge of %0.05 or 5bps. Compare that to most credit card companies that charge 2% plus a fixed transaction fee.

That also means their current run rate is $175,000/year which is not a huge business.

Cuban used a synthetic hedge.

"After we sold Broadcast.com, I hedged my stock with synthetic indexes, in case the market cratered in the six months before I could hedge my actual Yahoo shares. It cost me $20 million, but I protected what I had."

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/63/fasttalk.html

So he effectively hedged out his dot-com-bubble risk, not his yahoo-is-relatively-speaking-a-turd risk.

'it was much better when most stock market decisions were mostly based on "fundamentals"'

I don't recall such a period. Is there a particular interval you're thinking of?

That's not an article, that's a press release.

Source is Business Wire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Wire

"Business Wire is a company that disseminates full-text news releases from thousands of companies and organizations worldwide to news media, financial markets, disclosure systems, investors, information web sites, databases and other audiences"

Does the press have an incentive to talk about the plunge in profits? Yes

Does the company itself have an incentive to spin things by touting increased revenues? Yes

Assuming you know what you're doing or have a sense for what you believe the payout profile to be like, here's some metrics of the payout for N deals.

If you're at all risk averse, you probably want a percentile more like the 10th percentile payout, but this shows 50th percentile.

http://talkfast.org/2010/04/28/angel-investing-simulation-pa...

"Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed," Alcorn later recalled. "It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to 'come in the back door' and do all the work while he got the credit."

From the article in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3087492

You're wrong. Don't worry, he's snowed a lot more knowledgeable people than you. I would call it the key to his success.

I don't think its dark. I think its something people should think about more often and understand better.

Perhaps the things people are often celebrated for are actually chance outcomes of generally negative behaviors.

To know whether that is the case requires people to be more critical of people's positive aspects and spend more time thinking about their negative aspects.

I wholeheartedly agree, but want to point out that for him to do so is to cast doubt on the cult of personality and product that he created.

According to the more in depth article linked to in exit's comment:

'There is virtually no debate about the best treatment. “It has long been held that surgery can lead to very long-term survival,” says Kim.'

So this would not have been what your family has faced, and makes the criticism of alternative medicine valid.

Both provide platforms for others to post content. Both generate revenue due to the content.

You haven't specified how they differ. What property of one is unlike the other?

I think most people don't view social networks as extracting value from their user's the way they view financial traders doing so.

Some people will say that quant trading adds some value, but that the amounts the traders reap is too much.

I believe the value quant trading provides to its customers in proportion to the value it extracts is on par with social networking. A lot of the people who make arguments that quant trading provides no value have no idea how to value the liquidity that quant traders provide in the same way they can value what social networking provides. To appreciate what (most) quant trading firms provide, you have to have transacted frequently and significantly in the market.

I'm sure many people view bringing in a bunch of friends to seem busier than you really are positively. But I'm not so sure that I like it.

Is this not a deliberate and material misrepresentation of your company? If this were a financial contract being sold, wouldn't this be fraudulent?

1) The secretary problem does NOT assume a large number of candidates. In fact, your odds go down as the number of candidates go up.

2) The secretary problem DOES assume you can't go back once you've evaluated a candidate. This is not the case for prospective employees.

Edit: s/passed on/evaluated/

You can't use commercial focal planes in space. Rad hardened space hardware development moves slower than consumer.

For historical data, this will be an issue.

Going forward, the SEC is requiring filers to make this process much easier

http://xbrl.sec.gov/ http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf

If by the raw data you mean the actual filings with the SEC, then the raw data is available via ftp from the SEC itself.

http://sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/ftpusers.htm

Parsing the edgar documents is a mixed bag. Many of the older filings and some of the more recent ones are in text rather than HTML. Finding footnotes in the HTML is probably not that bad but the issue is the lack of complete coverage where you miss the HTML footnote or the document is in text instead

I've worked on parsing the HTML tables for tables like Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, etc. It was problematic and I only got about 70% of the way there but I think a more complex rule base could get to 90%. The issue is that 90% isn't really good enough for many users.

I've heard that CapitalIQ/Thompson Reuters actually use Indian financial professionals to manually extract the info. This could be a good way to backfill/double check missing/bad values but I chose not to try that path. In the end, many of the potential customers will opt for paying a much higher price for a better brand and/or higher level processing like normalizing accounting standards.

I think the point is that if you're not co-located, network transit time from your servers to IB, not even including IB to exchange, is an insurmountable disadvantage.

Max Dama wrote this regarding using IB to do low latency trading while a student but had interned at a HFT shop

http://www.maxdama.com/?p=334

The short of it is no :

Indicating there are 255 – 112 = 143 (!!!) hops and 124 milliseconds of latency. Obviously retail traders have no chance with HFT strategies.

But places like Lime are accessible to sophisticated traders and offer colo services

http://limebrokerage.com/

Given the information in your post, it is a bad idea to buy GOOG.

You have provided no proof that your expected growth is not already baked into the price.

Strange because the ocean is not a source of food?

Or because containers are not potential sources of concentrated toxins?

Who ever said I was trampling your vegetables? I'm merely making transit through your garden.

The effects of my analogy are likely more extreme than what is actually occurring. But like all analogies, its purpose is to emphasize a particular characteristic.

Would you mind if I gave you 5-nines yield as I walked my plutonium through your vegetable garden?

I think you're misplacing/mistaking the emphasis of the article

"As those awesome but not quite perfect systems get adopted on the global scale, we may face a host of strange and potentially dangerous results arise that we never saw coming."

The RFID paragraph is 1 of 7. And while I know next to nothing about shipping, I feel comfortable saying RFIDs could still add something to the current system.

News coverage/summary here

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-04/islam-blamers-ignor...

First class and business class are different things. You don't always simultaneously have both, but you can.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_class_travel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_class

"Liquidity is needed most when markets are falling outside the norm"

True but humans have fail-safes and kill switches too, thus this is not a valid argument against HFT in favor of human market makers. At any time, humans could step in and provide liquidity during the flash crash and during other crashes.

What information/experience informs your critique of markets/HFT?

Could an unintended side effect of this be that it encourages spammers to create even more botnets to run these computations?

If you question the government's ability to decide if it should go to hard science or 20K startups, then how can you trust their ability to choose which 20K startups?

In general, if you don't trust the government's ability to make a decision, then how can you trust their ability to delegate those decisions? This is a decision in and of itself.

Because there's much lower hanging fruit.

Extracting information and optimizing actions based on it via purchasing/timing decisions. Requires much less capital commitment and potentially much higher ROI.