That's correct, not all physics phd suck at programming some are good some are bad, but what i was trying to say is that if some physics phds have trouble at it you can get an idea how econ/finance phds are going to perform and reality confirms the hypothesis.
You don't have a clue... My wife is in the last semester of her nuclear physics PhD. She is a great C/C++ and the like programmer. bla bla bla. Doesnt' get more quant than that. Yet, she'll have some problem that takes 2 weeks to program in C, I can do it in half an hour in SAS or TSP. Why are people so "emotional" you ask? It's b/c you are being so bluntly arrogant and narrow-minded. What you have seen is not necessarly the "reality". It may just be the reality as <b>you</b> see it. A very different thing, since people tend to notice things that confirm their priors and disregard those that contradict them. Also, for your info, most if not all of the physics phds at my wife's department will be happy to ever earn a third of what the finance phds will be offered as starting salaries even in academia, not to mention industry. Dude, their professors are paid almost as much (or as little) as our phd TAs. And that's after suffering as post-docs for years. Talk about reality.
Well, This is my first time to reply to the ET threads. Education is still have some degrees of important. I have known a high school kid made around 1 millions one year, and the he lost most of them back the next year. He is very quiet, and stop trading right now. He has gut and he will come back!!! I think the problem is he doesn't have a way to calculate the risks...and money management stuff that all the people on this thread already know. With guts, you keep running and one day you get hit... Education can bring happiness? not always... I found some really good comments from the threads. Thanks to everybody.
OBSERVER: Harvard tips Financial Times; Jan 27, 2003 At one high-powered economic session including Larry Summers, former US Treasury secretary, the subject switched to how panellists arranged their own financial affairs. A subject of far from casual interest for Summers: as president of Harvard he has the university's endowment fund behind him. Sadly, he was unable to pass on useful tips. When he arrived at Harvard, Summers said, he had been made aware of the endowment's outstanding investment performance over decades. He was also told the secret of that success: "never taking too much advice from the members of the economics department".