Why not stop all this academic bs and learn to trade before you plop yourself in front of a computer screen for hours on end with nothing to do?
Imagine joepaterno being able to sit through it and learn one thing...... lol The monopoly board was priceless. I also liked the niche PEP didn't fall inot..... Our concept of using extracted profits to solve local problems is so pertinent.
Been hanging out on "Free Parking"... lol Appears many are having trouble getting past "Go and collect $200.00". Just need to keep the markets operational and liquid. Tough times are here for many and tougher times are straight ahead for others. Monopoly had a few things wrong though. 3 rolls of the dice to get out of jail. Does not work like that in markets. You and Todd have helped many with the "Get out free" cards. Sure is nice to have an unlimited supply of those laying around for the future needs. Immunity (as you say)... Have a nice evening.
Next week's threads: Cab driver trying to get into Automated Trading Shoeshine boy trying to get into Automated Trading School custodian trying to get into Automated Trading Motor Vehicles clerk trying to get into Automated Trading
A very interesting thing to consider for a moment is the computer. Programming and IT are just ticks on the time line of the financial industry. Long before either, the traditions of the financial industry were cast. The mainline of making money for the financial industry has nothing to do with the merits of what is called financial engineering. Zoom in on learning to trade instead. Learning is a process and everyone uses learning for acquiring skills and knowledge. The mind works in the same way no matter what the field of endeavor is. I thought it strange for a person who went to law school to be a person asking how to prep for doing automation. Law is organized around getting at the truth in an orderly manner. Academics has a lot to do with content and how to acquire content and give the content utility. "learning to trade" is a name given to becoming an operator. Automation of trading is more about effectiveness, efficiency and optimizing. Using programming and IT to grind new ideas into existing stuff is a fool's errand. As asiaprop points out he doesn't meet any people who are dealing with effectiveness, efficiency and optimizing. You abhore academic bs. Great! My viewpoint is that building the mind pragmatically by doing real drills is the way to get to excellence in any field of endeavor. The trader's or fund operator's target of building the mind is one thing only. A fully differentiated mind. For funds this take on the form of an automated organization. Staff can take the market's continuing offer if and only if they have minds that are differentiated for each of their roles. Hedge funds and mutual funds pay staff handsomely compared to other businesses. The government subjicates itself to the financial industries whims. All this is small potatos compared to the elephant in the room. The crayola test shows quite well what the market offers. There is a way to link the mind to this offer and it is not proggramming, IT, academic bs or the RCA Vacuum Tube Manual. Having all the pieces in the mind and having the pieces put together is the Grail. Getting the list is simple. Graphing out the relatiionship of the pieces is simple. All that has been done over and over and over. When the mind is differentiated, the trader trades with "unconscious competence". Watching "unconscious competence" in action is a neat event to witness and to understand the value of. It was done in ET for years in the chat room. The chats were archived as well. One of the common approaches for showing "unconscious comptence" is calling the market a specified number of minutes ahead of time and then doing the turns at the precise moment called for. Seeing a mind in operation is very helpful. It lets the observer catch on to where he will be in the near future once he has gone through putting the pieces in his mind. For some reason a lot of people think of their modus as "just what is possible". All people can ask themselves where any person they meet fits into a given spectrum. Occasionally, it happens that a person they meet does not fit into their spectrum of experience or knowledge or skills. At that time the person has a choice. He has the choice to add to his mind a few pieces he does not already have. He is not given any pieces ever. Pieces are earned by work. Work is a physicis term that relates applying energy over time. Pieces only stick in the mind if they become long term memory instead of just short term memory. My comments in this post arenot academic bs, programming oriented or IT oriented. they are not lawyer oriented, really. All these comments are is the Holy Grail for being an expert trader who trades at the fourth level of learning and skill: unconscious competence. Anyone reading this has unconscious competence for several things. The detractors here do NOT have unconscious comptence or they would be talking about it and doing the walk as well. As mentioned above both the talk and the walk are archived in ET from the chat room. There are many expert traders around and about; any person who trades with unconscious competence can recognize a peer in a New York minute. A person who needs something "proved" to him cannot get the proof in the first place. this person wants the proof because what he is asking for has no reality to him even though the market's offer is also there for him to see and he can't see that either. Why does Nitro say something is photoshopped; it is simply because he has never seen what he is looking at before. Minds are built to unconscious competence by doing a drills process. Do the work or don't do the work.
So true; anyone can build his mind to be able to tell a programmer what, how and why to do it. There is no one who makes the decision who cannot be a successful trader. A lot of people fail but it is NEVER because they were NOT capable. The bar to entering trading is set as low as any bar in the world. From fifth grade on everyone is home free.
I have been trading already for a couple of years. The thread's title wasn't 'Law student trying to get into trading'. lol good one
But that was my point. It should be . Trust me roam around here and do some searching before automating anything. There's A TON to sort through and you'll shorten your learning curve immensely.
I used to be a recruiter in financial services technology. The technologies/ languages that are in most demand are: C++...all the high frequency guys need to know this stuff inside and out Java...it's just everywhere, slowly becoming more frequent in HFT Unix/Linux - shell & other scripting...because windows is very rarely used in trading(at least high end) FIX Protocol...learn it Perl...for some reason I see it a lot but don't know why. I think it's more for systems programming. Surprisingly, I rarely saw Matlab and R in the job requirements that I saw. But then again, we didn't have a lot of job openings for quants. There are a few others and I myself am in the midst of learning Java & C++.