ctkrohn

17 ms·

121.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Or decent keyboards for their terminals. The new ones are glorified laptop keyboards, complete with non-standard key layout and a really shallow keystroke. And the fingerprint readers still break all the time. If you're selling software
122.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
If I'm not mistaken, the Netflix recommendation algorithm corrects for this effect by normalizing the scores. For example, suppose you're a movie cynic. The most you'll ever rate a movie is 3; suppose your average rating is a 2. Someone
123.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Ha, I just turned 24 and I work on Wall Street. I know more than enough about that lifestyle. You're right, it's definitely a golden cage. I didn't say I approved of the sentiments in my comment above. It's not a statement of moral corre
124.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Not to be pithy about it, but I think there's some truth to this idea: if you think you'll just work really hard for a bit and then quit to live a life of leisure, you probably won't get rich in the first place. Work itself has to interest
125.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
You said you're thinking about a career in Wall Street. I work as a trader at one of the big banks, so shoot me an email (address in profile) and I'll give you some thoughts about what it's like. I'd rather not air everything in a public
126.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Ha, mine was 103476,1704, password "angry?blink." I remember having a terrible time writing scripts to convince Linux's pppd to dial in and connect.
127.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
That's really funny. The HP-12C is still extremely popular at work. I could never bring myself to get used to it -- I still use my TI-89 from college -- and I get a lot of flak from the rest of the office.
128.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
For those of you who don't recognize the name -- Paul Tudor Jones is one of the most successful hedge fund managers of all time. He made most of his money trading commodities, but he now manages a massive multi-strategy, multi-asset class
129.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
One of the more conspiratorial explanations being passed around earlier today was that these bonds were secretly sold Japan in the 80s, to finance the growing deficit without letting anyone know. At that time, Japan was the largest holder
130.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Funny, I just finished reading Charles Stross' novel "Accelerando," where the concept of a Turing oracle is mentioned more than once. I get the feeling that's the only time these things appear in fiction... see http://www.antipope.org/cha
131.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
This is an absolutely terrible idea. A couple problems: 1) It creates huge concentrations of counterparty risk. Let's say you're the firm that invents the credit default swap. For the next five years, you are the counterparty for every s
132.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
It's probably been ten years since I even thought about looking something up in a CDROM encyclopedia, but even now it's kind of sad to think that Encarta is gone. When I was a kid, my dad bought a double-speed CDROM drive for our Digital E
133.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
Copula models didn't really work like that in the mortgage-backed securities world. Mortgages had been packaged into securities for decades before the copulas became popular, and securities with exposure to prepay correlation (e.g. CMO seq
134.
by ctkrohn 17y ago
I'm sure you'll get plenty of comments on hacker fiction, so here's some "business" fiction: * "The Bonfire of the Vanities" by Tom Wolfe. The classic novel of 80s Wall Street at its peak. * "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis. A prett
135.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Well, traders more specifically. You see plenty of 50-year old senior investment bankers -- they're the ones with the client relationships who bring in the big deals. It's pretty rare to see a trader over 40.
136.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
A much more amusing hack would be to write a Twitter client in VBA, so it's not just an Excel lookalike, it IS Excel.
137.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
I'd stay away from CDOs, but there are great opportunities in cash subprime and Alt-A mortgage bonds. If you know how to analyze the deal structures, it can be very lucrative. If you run the bonds to extremely draconian default and loss s
138.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Expect to lose your $2000. I'm not trying to dissuade you -- investing is a skill, and if it only costs $2000 to learn it, you've done great. If you're not afraid to lose your capital, you'll be much better positioned to take calculated r
139.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Excel allows you to do named ranges. Select a range, then type its name in the address box. Then, in another cell, you can type =sum(myrange).
140.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
There are plenty of third-party plugins that do this -- Bloomberg and Reuters have them, for example. For example, the formula for the current level of the Dow Jones Industrial average is =blp("INDU Index","LAST_PX"). The equivalent Reute
141.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
I wasn't talking about CDS, and I am aware that Blythe Masters is credited with inventing the CDS while at JPM. I think it's still too early to tell if CDS are good or bad on the whole. Ultimately, they're just insurance contracts, which
142.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
<i>Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III, Citigroup’s chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of money
143.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Modern Icelandic is very close to medieval Icelandic as spoken by the Vikings. Apparently, manuscripts of the sagas can be read and interpreted by an Icelandic speaker with no special training, just as you or I could read an original print
144.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Very interesting. A couple comments: - Is there any credit enhancement? Mortgage bonds didn't take off in the US until Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac agreed to guarantee timely payment of principal and interest on MBS they issued. Private la
145.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
The problem of "fat tails" has been known in finance for a long time, and there are plenty of models in which the distribution of price increments has a higher kurtosis than a Gaussian distribution. Interestingly enough, fractal models are
146.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
The disorder of their office is matched by the disorder of their website. A billion links, banner ads for unrelated things right in the middle of the website, two search boxes near each other... it's terrible.
147.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
Fantastic link. I'm a New Yorker, I find the city's history fascinating, and I loved the documentary "Helvetica." If you have the slightest interest in design or typography, go check out "Helvetica." I never realized how common Helvetica
148.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
I've heard people talk about it, but never seen any concrete applications to finance. If you know of any papers or introductory material, I'd be thrilled to check it out. I know nothing about wavelets or multiscale analysis -- I couldn't
149.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
PCA is an incredibly useful technique. At work we've been using it to model the structure of the yield curve, i.e. the graph of interest rates vs. maturity. Turns out you can decompose most daily movements of the yield curve into three co
150.
by ctkrohn 18y ago
I finished reading "Anathem" last weekend. I hate to be one of those fans who always claims "the old stuff was better," but Stephenson's style of expounding on cool ideas via novels works much better for shorter books like "Snow Crash." I

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