[HN Gopher] An Intern's Guide to Trading
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       An Intern's Guide to Trading
        
       Author : 6502nerdface
       Score  : 203 points
       Date   : 2021-07-07 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.nasdaq.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.nasdaq.com)
        
       | paveworld wrote:
       | Not sure if this will help you but...
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20210301042419/http://www.stockf...
        
       | anonu wrote:
       | First impression from a quick perusal: looks really good and
       | complete. Touches on topics not normally discussed in trading or
       | r/wsb
        
         | frakkingcylons wrote:
         | Indeed. This is a good resource to counter the nonsense that is
         | spread about payment for order flow and market makers.
        
       | anm89 wrote:
       | Does anyone remember starfighter.io/stockfighter.io that
       | Kalzumeus put up years ago? It was based around coding market
       | making strategies based on the structures presented in this
       | article.
       | 
       | I still kick myself for not completing that when it was up. I'm
       | always hoping that that will make it's way back up one day
        
         | clusterhacks wrote:
         | I sure do - I finished all the stockfighter levels and loved
         | the experience.
         | 
         | There were some people who reverse-engineered stockfighter and
         | had at least some of the code on github. You might try looking
         | around for it.
         | 
         | I sometimes look around for companies that use hiring
         | challenges like that now but haven't had much luck.
         | 
         | I think fly.io is using some type of challenge in their hiring
         | process which makes sense given tptacek, patio11, and elptacek
         | were the stockfighter cofounders.
        
           | tptacek wrote:
           | We do exclusively use work-sample hiring at Fly.io right now,
           | though it looks a lot different from Starfighter
           | (Microcorruption, Starfighter's predecessor, also wasn't the
           | work sample we used at Matasano; both Starfighter and
           | Microcorruption were about outreach). It'd be neat to come up
           | with something Starfighter-y/Microcorruption-y that meshed
           | with what we're doing at Fly.io.
           | 
           | (I don't want to get too far off on a tangent here, though,
           | because I also nerd out about market structure stuff and
           | that's what the thread is about.)
        
           | distrill wrote:
           | I swear every 2 years tptacek has a new company with some
           | obscure name.
           | 
           | I guess fly isn't that obscure, maybe he's turning over a new
           | leaf.
        
             | tptacek wrote:
             | I didn't start Fly.io! That's why it has a normal name.
        
               | idlewords wrote:
               | You didn't start the Fly.io
               | 
               | It was always burning, since the world's been turning
        
         | Bootvis wrote:
         | I think the ending was somewhat underwhelming but I sure had
         | fun tinkering with C++.
         | 
         | I know of a competition putting where students against each
         | other. Competing with others seems more fun.
        
         | catern wrote:
         | I loved Stockfighter. I played through it as preparation for
         | starting my first job out of college, at an HFT. No comment on
         | whether it was good preparation. :)
        
         | WA wrote:
         | Why was stockfighter never open sourced? I played it, never
         | finished it unfortunately.
        
           | tptacek wrote:
           | We were all super busy after we moved on from the business.
        
       | AudienceFakeout wrote:
       | >Access Denied
       | 
       | >You don't have permission to access
       | "http://www.nasdaq.com/articles/an-interns-guide-to-trading-2..."
       | on this server.
       | 
       | >Reference #18.e0745968.1625685764.2ef97a3a
       | 
       | Why do sites do this? Yes, I'm using Tor Browser to protect my
       | privacy and stop big companies from tracking me. But I can just
       | plug the URL into an archive service and read it from there.
        
         | unholythree wrote:
         | Nasdaq.com will block you temporarily for the sin of not
         | running all the JavaScript they want. It's pretty annoying but
         | I guess it mostly affects users they don't care about. I don't
         | visit enough to know the exact mix I'd have to allow in
         | noscript to earn their trust.
        
         | slownews45 wrote:
         | Because the amount of abuse / scam / crap via Tor is
         | incredible?
        
           | AudienceFakeout wrote:
           | I suspect it's just a passive aggressive way to punish people
           | who value their privacy.
        
           | anoncake wrote:
           | This is a blog post.
        
             | slownews45 wrote:
             | This is nasdaq.com
             | 
             | Any major player with an actual security dept is going to
             | have evaluated just blocking Tor - or they are wildly
             | irresponsible. It's a relative low effort way to get a win
             | on security with minimal harm to customers and particularly
             | paying customers.
             | 
             | Their sec ops team will be subscribed to things like DHS
             | CISA alerts.
             | 
             | Alert (AA20-183A) Defending Against Malicious Cyber
             | Activity Originating from Tor
             | 
             | They will evaluate the least effort approach and
             | potentially follow it.
        
               | anoncake wrote:
               | No. It's a blog post. End of story, I don't care who made
               | it. Letting someone view a blog post is not a security
               | risk, anyone who treats it as one is wildly incompetent.
        
               | dsr_ wrote:
               | It's a lot easier to have the consistent policy "we block
               | Tor exit nodes" than "we block Tor exit nodes, except on
               | this site".
               | 
               | Then they have to make that decision about every site.
               | And re-evaluate that decision every so often.
        
               | anoncake wrote:
               | Of course. If you aren't competent enough to make good
               | decisions, you have to make easy ones.
        
         | tekromancr wrote:
         | Because if you set up something like fail2ban to automate
         | blocking abusive traffic, it's going to quickly block tor exit
         | nodes and public vpn servers
        
       | H8crilA wrote:
       | This is great, but remember that if you're interested in
       | investing, and not the markets themselves and trading, then this
       | whole landscape is already so over-optimized to the point of
       | being irrelevant. You could've achieved everything you wanted in
       | investing even in the pre-computer era, like for example Buffett
       | did. In fact you could've done everything you wanted already in
       | the 1600s Amsterdam - see the book "Confusion of Confusions", a
       | pretty great read.
       | 
       | Read the 10-Ks, think about what people (will) need, what kind of
       | margin pressures and competition dynamics will play out across
       | the economy, read finance history books, play with pricing
       | models. Focusing on market structure is kind of like focusing on
       | network adapters and packet switching details, focusing on
       | valuations/pricing/finance is like building deep ML models. Of
       | course you need the damn networks to work, but guess what - some
       | pretty clever people have already solved that for you.
        
         | kachnuv_ocasek wrote:
         | You seem to be implicitly assuming that financial markets are
         | efficient and that market makers and high-frequency trading
         | firms are the ones making that happen. Both of these
         | assumptions are demonstrably false.
        
           | H8crilA wrote:
           | I'm making neither of those assumptions. Also, HFT is pretty
           | much as far from making markets "efficient" prediction
           | mechanisms as you can. HFT is a part of the plumbing of
           | financial markets, they arb out the tiny but obvious things.
           | For example they're the people that make ETFs possible -
           | Vanguard or what have you doesn't actually go and buy all the
           | thousands of securities that they have in their products,
           | they outsource it to so called Authorized Participant (read:
           | some org with HFT skills).
        
             | whimsicalism wrote:
             | > HFT is pretty much as far from making markets "efficient"
             | prediction mechanisms as you can
             | 
             | ? HFT facilitates liquidity, liquidity facilitates
             | efficiency.
        
               | H8crilA wrote:
               | Yes of course, but i meant as far as you _can_ [while
               | still being a market participant].
               | 
               | Nobody really cares (except for traders) if the US 10
               | year note is at 1.54% or 1.52%, but rather if it's at
               | 1.5%, or 2.5%, or 3.5%. Or even 10%.
        
             | smabie wrote:
             | I wouldn't say that HFT arbs out only the "obvious" things.
             | We try to arb the non obvious things as well, with more or
             | less success.
             | 
             | HFT just means you trade a lot and you have low tick to
             | trade latency. It doesn't say much about why you are
             | trading.
             | 
             | For example you could have a HFT stat arb strategy in which
             | you are arbing higher dimensional factors that are pretty
             | far from obvious.
             | 
             | In general, the speed wars are over and everyone is
             | reaching deep to become as smart as possible. Or in the
             | other words, just being fast is no longer an edge, it's a
             | commodity.
        
               | qorrect wrote:
               | > For example you could have a HFT stat arb strategy in
               | which you are arbing higher dimensional factors that are
               | pretty far from obvious.
               | 
               | What does this mean (HFT stat arb strategy)? What higher
               | dimensional factors ? Ty!
        
               | whimsicalism wrote:
               | > In general, the speed wars are over and everyone is
               | reaching deep to become as smart as possible. Or in the
               | other words, just being fast is no longer an edge, it's a
               | commodity.
               | 
               | I'm curious what the best techniques for being "smart"
               | are when you have to have such quick turnaround. Are
               | these rules-based techniques, statistical but
               | interpretable, or black box?
        
               | smabie wrote:
               | I would say all of the above, with a general transition
               | from rules -> statistical -> black box as time goes on.
               | 
               | But you're right that being fast and smart is pretty
               | hard. You almost always have to sacrifice one for the
               | other. Different firms operate on different spectrums of
               | this speed vs smarts divide: some are faster and dumber
               | (relatively), some are slower and smarter. But everyone
               | is trying to up skill (analogous to moving up on the
               | value chain), because the markets have gotten _fiercely_
               | competitive at the nanosecond to millisecond scale,
               | especially on american venues (CME for example is a
               | straight shark tank).
        
           | gruez wrote:
           | >Both of these assumptions are demonstrably false.
           | 
           | Can you demonstrate?
        
             | whatever1 wrote:
             | Yes solve any market equilibrium model and compare to the
             | real deal.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | tptacek wrote:
         | I'm not so much interested in investing at all, but I'm
         | _fascinated_ by market structure details like these; it 's like
         | an Internet of money. It has extreme nerd value, regardless of
         | its utility for profit seeking. :)
         | 
         | Also, the details in this article are implicated in all sorts
         | of HN threads, so it's useful to have a place to link to when
         | people start debating how market makers work or things like
         | that.
        
           | H8crilA wrote:
           | Yeah, it's a heavily optimized technical system, it simply
           | has to attract nerds :)
        
         | SkyMarshal wrote:
         | _> (see the book "Confusion of Confusions", a pretty great
         | read)._
         | 
         | Out of print, but gwern has a pdf:
         | https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/1688-delavega-confusion...
        
       | bambataa wrote:
       | This looks really interesting! I am relatively new to a tech role
       | in finance and am still learning all the terminology. Does anyone
       | know of a book that teaches markets from a historical, narrative
       | perspective? I have found textbooks explaining the main asset
       | classes and so on, but I think it would be really interesting to
       | see an explanation of eg the repo market, invoice swaps etc as
       | the evolution of solutions to problems.
        
         | smabie wrote:
         | Not exactly what you are looking for but this is pretty good:
         | 
         | https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Take-Hindmost-Financial-Specula...
        
           | 9214 wrote:
           | https://archive.org/details/deviltakehindmos00chan
        
         | drdrey wrote:
         | I think "The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative
         | Professionals" comes close to what you're asking.
        
         | ra7 wrote:
         | Economics of Money and Banking [1] is what you're looking for,
         | especially if you're interested in a historical narrative of
         | the monetary system.
         | 
         | [1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/money-banking
        
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       (page generated 2021-07-07 23:00 UTC)