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So You Want To Be A Modern "Trader": Here Are The Requirements
Igor Oystracher's 3Red trading firm may not exist much longer after the recent vicious crackdown against the company's spoofing practices profiled a month ago in "Russian College Dropout Busted For 1,316 Spoofs Of Everything From E-Minis, To Copper, To VIX", an assault orchestrated by none other than king of HFT market-manipulation, Citadel itself, but for now he is busy looking for new trader meat.... ideally with pimples.
Back in 2010 we predicted that as a result of the advent of HFTs as the most profitable form of market manipulation on Wall Street, old school rolodex-and-phone, carbon-based traders were a dying breed and on their way out. Little did we know just how accurate we would be.
Below is a "help wanted" ad for a "trader" by none other than the abovementioned 3Red spoofers. We put trader in quotation marks because... well, just read the ad and you will see.
Here are the required skills you must have to be a successful "trader" in the new normal. For all those who satisfy the requirements, best of luck and may the best man (or vacuum tube) win, preferably in less time than it takes to frontrun a Bank of Japan E-mini "buy" order.
h/t @sellputs
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Got it......Where do i sign?
I didn't know Linda Green had a little brother with a MS in Mathematics
It's not rocket science but it's getting close.
So simple, even a cave man could do it.
Linear predictive models?
Old school.
interesting.... not a single mention of skills or aptitude in disciplines like determining fair value, detecting malinvestment, identifying market prospects or momentum overreach, prudential risk management, etc etc
and they were wanky buzzwords in their own day.
^^^ Who cares about those details when your trades only last micro-seconds and you are scraping the difference between bid vs ask... Fundamentals are so yesterday in the new paradigm... Ain't it grand...
Hell squid, they weren't teaching those at university when I majored in finance. I did get a couple of quarters of foreign exchange and interest rate parity, though. Of course that was when the risk-free rate was commonly assumed to be 3%.
semester 1 stuff in a Masters in analytic finance degree.
This is troll at the bridge stuff. Picking pennies to allow others to trade.
Don't be naive. You gotta step with the time. Risk-management is in trading, so it is included in the algorithms. Company fair value? What "fair" value? What does "fair" mean? Who cares about value, look around, stock-buybacks on zero debt avalanche, out-of-reality "valuations" of social media garbage etc etc
"in my book you either do it right or you get eliminated". These days "doing right" is not determining "fair" value.
Handled by the supervised and unsupervised machine learning. The machines learn these concepts as they go.
for example:
http://gekkoquant.com/2012/05/26/neural-networks-with-r-simple-example/
The more parsimoniuos the system the better chance of profitable results. Leave the complications for Swiss watches.
Pretty sure that's the same list of qualifications to operate the Large Hadron Collider as well.
Einstein traded Internet Stocks before the bubble started. Damn he was good.
lol
"low latency" that equals as fast and freaky as you can make the code run over the wires!!
order66,
Brilliant!
DavidC
Ding! Winnah!! Where comedy meets reality
Just so happens I know a dude who lead a team at the LHC doing particle physics research looking for certain particle types. Hes now a quant at a small HFT firm doing algos. I guess once the grant money dries up ts time to look for a real job.
<Dr Evil quotes> he's a trader </Dr Evil quotes>
This is where the best & brightest today put their talents towards.
That's where you can make dough these days, mate. That or "social media" garbage. Does not pay to be an average working stiff or a researcher/teacher these days. Medical schools take 10 years and hundreds of thousands of debt. Machine learning is actually fun and you can do a lot on your own, without paying exhorbitant "fees".
"Traitor" - they should probably hire a proofreader instead
Old Trick, you already have someone you want to hire, but you need to get around the H1B visa thing...
You put out a add for a job that is so specialized/tailored to the person you want, that it is unlikely that anyone else is going to fit the bill. Then you tell the immigration people "Look, we tried, here's the add we put in the paper see"...
Gots to keep it legal...
I recall telling my parents in 1976 that getting a C+ was where it's at. How right I was, only I was missing a +/R and we didn't have computers then.
LTER:
You are saying that you weren't man enough to handle Hollerith cards?
Fully admit. I do recall the punch cards, and I missed that boat.
Rand, as usual, you are ahead of your time. Literally. From Wikipedia, "Bjarne Stroustrup, a Danish computer scientist, began his work on C++'s predecessor "C with Classes" in 1979.[6]" Until then there was just C, which was what Linux was recompiled with at the time.
I beleive Mr Rand was referring to his school grades.
Watfive y'all.
Retail sailes are really bad...
Ty Warner,
beanie babies, owner,
told his people that he needs sales so deliver them to stores even though they didn't order them so he can post them as sold items.
Sales are horrible.
Store managers are complaining that they didn't order the items.
"Trader"? Hell yeah. Trade a low revenue math degree for a yacht.
They want someone who can do rocket surgery. And of course take entry level pay. live at work and not have any of those annoying families to distract you.
must be willing to be thrown under bus
pay: minimum wage
:snark:
LOL !!!
Don't forget the swell life insurance policy the company will never have to pay since the employee is bound to kill themselves at some point...
Lin's Mandarin needs a chef.
I saw that too. Honest way to make a living. What are the hours like?
("The hours are OK. It's the minutes that are terrible.")
Nice.
C++?
Rookiez. We code that shit in erlang my nigga.
That was my thought too, LOL!
Erlang over C++ any day for this sort of software.
And R instead of MATLAB or Mathematica? Double LOL!
...well, they are advertising in print media afterall. Kinda says it all right there.
Let me just be the douche that tells you that your time will come as well. When I was in my twenties, PC and McIntosh (yes, it was McIntosh then) were new. Alexander Bell, a great inventor, still had a lock on phones, which were analog. Your time involves programming languages and abbreviating sentences, e.g., laughing out loud. Which has become a bit old even for this old guy, but I'm sure it's still very cool for you. I should probably add an emoticon in order to further explain myself.
MATLAB is passe and expensive.
R has thousands of very bright people developing stuff for it daily. It's not the same R that you once read about 10 years ago. But stick to your obsolete corporate software Matlab for all I care.
This is mainstream. You can even outsourced to India and avoid the min wage. Like car mechanics in the global markets with all gitzmos. Financial Engineering 2.0.
Yeah, I don't think to many firms are going to trust outsourced indian code with $100M+ realtime trading exposure. They want the guy that just fucked up down the hall so they can beat him senseless, or at least stop the rogue traders before a market meltdown is blamed on them.
"live market"?
As opposed to small-time investors' 100-msec-plus delayed market?
I'm sure by now anyone in a IT technology field does not read a newspaper and of all things to look for a job!
All the IT dudes I know spend their whole days looking at white letters on a black background - they find black on white a bit outside their comfort zone.
They do sometimes kick it up a notch to green on black, or something, to break the monotony.
I do know one IT guy with a sense of humour.
green on black is THE classic. I love it!
Correct, I get bombarded by recruiters daily on LinkedIn. let the job come to you.
Gold!
Your computer program must be able to beat their computer program, or no Bonus.
PS ; guy in room next to you is also trying to beat your program
I learned C64 and how to add popcorn. Therefore, I'm overqualified.
Tyler, from where do you get such ads? From the libraries archive?
Maybe Tyler posted the ad, just to fill space and watch the comments!
Everything is manipulated!
Stop manipulating the narrative with the truth, Tyler! I'm outside my "rainbow & unicorn" zone! :D
10 print "penis"
20 goto 10
RUN
Sooooo, they're looking for a technical trader as opposed to a fundamental one?
Searching for a scapegoat when something goes tits up?
Travel carefully.
Not necessarily. You can teach a machine how to read company financial statements.
With all the money why not SPSS or SAS. R is cool, but limited on one-machine's RAM/CPU. Meh. Crazy Russians.
I think that the closer to assembly language, the faster the code. All the guys who do assembly are in nursing homes by now, so they're going for the next best thing.
While that is true, what's being done today is generally massively parallel code running on either a bunch of GPGPU nodes or a bigger bunch of CPU nodes. Hadoop is probably a likely candidate, and most GPGPU code is written in C derivatives.
"All the guys who do assembly are in nursing homes by now, so they're going for the next best thing."
Lots of coders still doing assembly, To maximumize performance C/C++ functions are sometimes written in assembly, as well as OpenCL (GPU). Lots of embedded systems also use assembly. Now there are also large FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) which provides the means to process data directly in hardware.
However, Lots of code is written using C/C++ libraries. C/C++ complied code is usually faster than Java and other languages.
Cut
Paste
A fifth grader could do it.
R has developed quite a bit since 200X in which you are stuck.
Here's my application: 011011101111001011011000101010001010011
Cause I'm a human/machine hybrid. Plus, I know several Spanish curse words. When do I start? I'm not worried about the pay because before they can even blink, I'm going to steal it from everyone else probably while their sleeping.
can I watch porn on my breaks? :-)
Ya sounds like a commission only gig
It will be fascinating once quantum computing kicks in; trader wanted for 4red (2017), expereienced in:
Qubit's
Optical lattices
Quantum gate array
Diamond-based quantum computer
Quantum chromodynamics; any ethnicity considered, we only care about red, green & blue
Apply now to put your unique skill-set to good use; why waste your talents in sciences like chemistry, cryptography, nanotechnology...
As I said a long time ago (to none of y'all I suppose), when management is given over to lawyers, accountants, mba's and hr specialists- and taken from entrepreneurs, engineers, coders and makers...
You can expect pandemonium.
Pandemonium ensues.
To the ad- What they want is unclear from the actual text, but if you know how to speak bullshit; They want pretty much anyone who is not of European heritage with an IQ over 100.
Why would anyone with that skill set want to work for someone else?
Access to other people's money.
Regarding the ad, that really is an impressive skill-set needed. I wonder how many programmers write easter eggs in their code, ready to purge the codebase once they're scape-goated? I few misplaced decimal places in obfuscated code and you'd have a fist full of fat-fingered trades.
Whats the pay? Any benefits?
'
'
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They forgot the ubiquitous…
"Able to handle fast paced environment and multitask!"
•?•
V-V
Where is the 'Hot Chicks only need to apply'?
Tis interesting there is nothing about knowing jack over shit about stocks, earnings, EPS, dividends, - you know, all that stuff.
"Market".
humph...
That's because you teach the machine to learn these things for you.
Ideal position for Navinder Singh Sarao.
Now, i know why your fucking retards wallstreet hired H1B Asian/Indian expats. That's the spec for someone PHD which EXCEL's in STEM's. Not a job vacancies of American retards good for nothing but "Flipping Burgers"!!
Bwahahahaha...
This IS trading though. It's just an engineering approach to trading.
Sorry traders, like burger flippers, you've been automated and engineered out of the loop, you're now redundant.
That mathematical modeling worked out pretty well for LTCM.
/s
Hell anyone reading this or anyone with half a brain can post that ad. Just pay the bright young lad/lass on commission from trading profits from algorithms they write. So they do all the work and you make most of the profit. If someone can successfully write these algorithms they are brainiacs math-wise but complete idiots if they don't work for themselves.
Liquidity taking, market making, earth shaking..... you really took me.
i could never understand the use of algorithms in nonlinear systems like the stock market. Algorithms are linear and cannot, in the long run, reliably predict the outcome of a system filled with variables that constantly change over time.
Lol that's rubbish... that's just one add for one type of trader
They don't mention the part about maintaining emotional balance when there is a few million bucks going up in digital smoke.