Are financial programmers under paid?

Discussion in 'Automated Trading' started by nitro, Jun 26, 2009.

Are financial programmers underpaid?

  1. Yes, they sell themselves out too easily

    73 vote(s)
    40.6%
  2. No, they are scum that are mostly lazy

    39 vote(s)
    21.7%
  3. I am not sure

    31 vote(s)
    17.2%
  4. I don't care

    37 vote(s)
    20.6%
  1. In these 218 items, what causes the most distortion?

    Quantify it to one less significant figure than the data provided.
     
    #51     Jun 28, 2009

  2. You are a very cool guy.

    I would love to hear you explain this to Boyd, Steenbarger and Greenspoon.
     
    #52     Jun 28, 2009
  3. It's never so trivial in the real world, Jack. Your statisticians will go so far as to look at leverage, the hat matrix, deleted residuals, semi-studentized and studentized residuals, the variance inflation factor, or ratios of the magnitudes of the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix.

    You'd benefit from some more clarity in your posts, Jack. I feel as if you could convey most of your points in 75% less characters.
     
    #53     Jun 28, 2009
  4. There isn't anything magical about how much an employer is willing to pay any employee.

    The same applies to programmers as it does to the cleaning lady and the trader.

    1) How much money does the business make?

    2) How many of you are there around to hire?

    3) Can I do without you? (ie do you have close substitutes)

    On an individual basis, how much you make a case for your compensation, how pushy you are all matter. But the overall band of what your pay can be are generally set by those 3 above factors.
     
    #54     Jun 29, 2009
  5. 218 items..wow ..... distortion!! ..story????
     
    #55     Jun 29, 2009
  6. Seriously, my point was that programmers are an integral key to a firm's building wealth. I also feel independent firms comprised of a few quality persons can really clean up in a few years and then be free to do anything desired.

    The eighth grade earth science question was a very clear example of the of the opportunity you and others are neglecting.

    It is not so much that a teacher gives an intellectual exercise to a class. What is at hand, as Rosy says, is connecting the programmer to the opportunity.

    I know you cast aside the retail definition of the opportunity. But others don't.

    The 218 items needed to be divided into two groups and then analyzed separately to see the meaningful differences. The example was the classic pairs trading algorithm. Much has gone into pairs trading theory and practice.

    Obviously eighth graders can ID each element and put it in the right class and then redetermine the correct values for the subset that was misvalued. Then all of the characteristics for each element can be tabulated and used to see what is coming next fo ech element.

    Tufte cited the initial information presentation in "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" at a time before the Quant Era began in the financial industry. It is in the chapter entitled: Multifunctional Graphical Elements.

    Imagine a retail trader going through sorting stocks on a platform. He notices the platform is screwed up. In a series of corrections taking part of the team of 20 programmers, the cause and rectification of the problem is taken care of. The platform merchandisers can now tell their clients their house is in order and the improvement makes the client base expand. This took over 6 months. It lead to other major platform improvements as a consequence.

    What caused this last consequence was someone asking: do you have any other recommendations? What caused the question to be asked was the proferred correct evaluation of the platform's failings that, then could be hamdled since it became known.

    Two information sources for the same data was how the problem became ID'ed by a person who knew what he was doing.

    I have been nudging you along a little. So have others. A lot of programmers need to be nudged here and there. Most businesses have plans and the planning has some automated aspects. Programmers do the automating. So why can't programmers make plans for trading markets that are business like expressions? We see why in this thread. Programmers do not deal with money making in any way to learn what is going on that they could make part of their activity and life style.

    Imagine those little eighth graders who did the volcano problem when they get to be members of an independent team that is extracting the offer of the market (what is represented on a automated zig zag chart) continually.

    Is there any risk when always trading on the right side of the zig zag chart?

    Eighth graders easily discover measuring the height of volcamos from sea level is not correct. Eighth graders can figure out how volcanos grow in very little homework time.

    Another problem they like is dealing with a 16 dimensional railroad chart. They will almost always want to build a railroad and run it after looking at such a chart. A neat one ot use is one of the ones collected by Japanese spies before WWII, especially if it is stamped secret. Kids like dealing with charts that have 16 dimensions. Can programmers? Sure.

    Growing money works the same way in many respects. Growing personal wealth is very important and using programming to do it is something every programmer should consider beginning at some point.

    What is the statistic used to determine how much of the market's offer an ATS takes? We all know it must be an exponential ratio, but what ratio>
     
    #56     Jun 29, 2009
  7. ^ what happens if you do the exact opposite?
     
    #57     Jun 30, 2009
  8. nitro

    nitro

    Answer:

     
    #58     Jun 30, 2009
  9. nitro

    nitro

    In this interesting developing story,

    http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-case-of-quant-trading-industrial.html

    note that Sergey Aleynikov salary is $400k/YR in NYC. that would put you a full $100k above what I consider good pay for an above average strong programmer. Other than Erlang, I see nothing on this resume that 95% of the strong programmers on ET have similar experience.

    GS is probably going to get a deluge of resumes.
     
    #59     Jul 5, 2009
  10. nitro

    nitro

    #60     Jul 6, 2009