Actually most of the people that go into these Hedge Funds are the ones that are not talented enough to get tenure or do basic research. The "world" is not missing much by having them there. However, there are a bunch of high schools or junior colleges that would love to have them, and that is a shame. nitro
nitro, Don't be hatin' bro! haha. Tenure isn't all that it cracks up to be. Some untalented people get tenured while others don't. The system is more political that you think. Do you know Jim Simons background? He was an MIT/Harvard/Berkeley math prof. He won one of the highest award in math (akin to the Fields Medal) in Geometry. So, he's no chump. Obviously, not everyone at Rentech is like that. But tenure is a highly politicized process. I knew of a brilliant prof at my alma mater. He waited and waited and didn't get tenured. So, he left for another school and got instant tenure.
I don't understand what this means. I have never known a single person at a major University that got tenure at Physics or Mathematics that hadn't produced genuine research. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen... I am aware of his background. Isaac Newton and many of histories greatest scientists have attempted to play the markets before hedge funds were around. The difference is that most of them did not have acess to real money and access to computers. I would say that success is closer to having a gift on using computers than comming up with "original" research. No one goes into mathematics or physics with the intent at ending up working at a hedge fund. It is a fallback plan. Starting one is a different story... nitro
for anyone who cares... I still say it's hocus-pocus. yah just can analyze the market to death and expect to make profits. I made around 650-points this week (not without drawdown, tho minor) that is meager for me, and I didn't use any of those super-brainy technicals. Have a great 4th of July, guys! Coinz
I've heard that doctor argument way too many times. And it usually comes from daytraders and financial journalists! No surprise considering the weaker ones (others are fine) are being embarassed by hedge funds. The efficient allocation of resources is more responsible for the creation of wealth and advancement of life-saving drugs and technology than any other factor. Explain why the US create so many more life-saving drugs and technological advances than communist Russia and China combined! It has much more to do with capitalist incentives rather than any genetic differences. Politicians shouldn't be responsible for allocating money to medical research - capitalism and market demand should be. If it wasn't for the class-action lawyers making every new drug cost $100 million more than it should, society would be much better off. Remember politicians are the same group trying to allocate my taxes to force everyone to upgrade to high-definition television, which I'm still not sure how that improves economic productivity. If hedge funds controlled more money/capital than mo-mo mutual funds (let's face it, they're all momo) during the internet era, we probably wouldn't have had the bubble and following recession we did. The amount of talent and energy lost to dot-coms is probably the greatest destruction of intelligence capital in the history of mankind. In summary, hedge funds do provide a very useful function in society - in fact probably one of the most useful. They can distinguish between bullsh*t companies vs good ones and market bubbles vs reality, while mutual funds, the other major institutional investor, cannot. If the people there could, would they really still be at a mutual fund?
Richard, there are quite a few high frequency hedge funds. Steve Cohen of SAC investment, DE Shaw, are two better known examples. Two Sigma is one of the newer ones. Difference between the couples are the instruments they trade, Renaissance is / was (at least 2-3 years ago) primarily Futures and listed exchange derivatives. SAC and DE Shaw are more focused on equities. Most such funds do not hire people from typical wall street, rather, they look for people from academia. I have seen fresh undergrads gotten hired, but they tend to have competed in say, the Putnams or ACM programming contest, in the finals. But what the analysts do are very experimental, data analysis type of work, a lot of hypothesis proving. A friend who works at DE Shaw used to model electronic diffusion clouds for DNA research, and he is now doing very similar methods for cross-market studies. As for me, I left academia a long time ago, decent coder, so I can grind through the PhD and publish a little, but I was never that good in theoretical research. For instance, a system I wrote can analyze about 500k Level 2 book changes in 1 minute (corresponding to approximately 4 hours of NYSE trading, for a stock like IBM). And I was pretty smug until I showed to a friend at SAC, and he quickly pointed out a few inefficiencies in my code, and he show me his engine that did a similar high-freq simulation in approx 3 seconds! I was floored.
Some articles by Richard Olsen on high-freq finance http://www.olsen.ch/research/working_papers.html I believe what is being applied in Ren. Tech. or DE Shaw are out of reach from us. But I believe some very basic TA we are using actually hv roots in high-freq finance. ... So what I want to know is... is there any common advices drawn from high-freq finance that can be of value to us as avg traders?