6 ms·
Not to mention the fact that your job would be less than meaningless
by yob28 5y ago
Not to mention the fact that your job would be less than meaningless
- mustyoshi 5y agoWhat kind of meaningful job produces enough value to justify making 7x what the median US worker makes?
- treeman79 5y agoWhen young, I was asked to take over reporting for a couple weeks while someone went on vacation. It was a full time position that required 7 solid hours a day of work. I had the position fully automated by the time person got back. Thankfully they took it well and they got more interesting assignments. 2 weeks of my time saved several years of salary for company. I did this many times.
- boppo1 5y agoHow do I reach this level of confidence in programming ability?
- treeman79 5y agoAutomate everything. Regardless if it saves time or not. Pickup a good scripting language. Ruby or python. Spend time with business people on “why” they are doing something. Learn Excel. After awhile you will be incredibly good at highly useful business process stuff.
- the_only_law 5y agoI wonder if this stuff pays well though. I recall someone showing me a position at Jane Street (since this thread was discussing HFTs) with at was looking for a VBA developer to develop some sort of integrations between their APIs and Excel sheets I guess someone in the company loved. My first though was “there’s no way this is paying what you typically see for Jane Street developer salaries”.
- treeman79 5y agoPayed crap. It setup me up for success. Learned more in demand stuff and my pay is top notch.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoIronically, that is also what the “meaningless” HFT firms do. Automate trading so fewer and fewer traders are needed.
- UweSchmidt 5y agoThey are not replacing "needed traders", i.e. people that used to execute trades required by real people or companies, like "buy some Apple stock". These firms are playing their very own game in the markets, ultimately extracing money from the economy, with the supposed public benefit of "creating liquidity" (not needed for real investors who can very well wait a day or two before closing a deal) while actually distorting the markets and obscuring the real value).
- lotsofpulp 5y agoNo one is stopping the buyers who can wait a day or two from placing limit orders. If the HFT firms are earning profits, it is because someone wants to pay them for the liquidity.
- cma 5y agoLow latency trading is so crucial to the economy that the market mostly shuts down at 4pm every day and takes weekends and holidays, adding 2^47 nanosecond delays every week without much outcry. And whoever wins by 20ns gets rewarded the same as the previous guy who was winning by 21ns. The magnitude of latency isn't rewarded, just coming in first, so more and is spent on less an less absolute improvements, none of which have been relevant to human reaction times for decades.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago> The magnitude of latency isn't rewarded, just coming in first, so more and is spent on less an less absolute improvements, none of which have been relevant to human reaction times for decades. So why are the HFT firms earning profits? There is no law that says people are obligated to do business with them. There is no law that says people have to buy at the prices HFT firms are selling at and sell at the prices HFT firms are buying at.
- distribot 5y agoDo you mean meaningful in the bull** jobs way or the moralistic way? I find the moralistic version confusing. I usually hear it applied to CEO pay, which last year was 350x the average worker. But what will ever feel like a fair or just differential? 7x? 3x? And what would be a fair metric? Are dentists less or more than social workers? What about dangerous jobs, are lumberjacks worth more than coal miners?
- notfromhere 5y agoNone, but neither does any job that makes double or triple digit multiples of what the US median worker makes.
- anonuser123456 5y agoLiquidity is not meaningless.
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoThey don't really create liquidity, but they did narrow the bid-ask spread. The "liquidity" they provide dries up when volatility spikes anyways (although that was always true, so not really a criticism of HFT).