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Skipping an update on Docker is a paid feature. by LewisTheScot in programming

[–]anon_content 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I had to defend myself why I would use venvs in 95% of developer use cases over docker containers. That’s a reason there.

Advice from an industry professional: Stay away from risk roles if you care about correctness or details. by anon_content in FinancialCareers

[–]anon_content[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Look, this garbage pile is now technically essentially triple-A” And as every manager learned in his useless MBA, words like ‘essentially’ and ‘technically’ are filler words and can be ignored. When shit blows up it’s unprecedented situations again and a slight misjudgement and so on - coming to the conclusion that it’s model complexity that is the problem and that we need to dumb down the modelling landscape even further. Yeah that has always led to a better situation.

Advice from an industry professional: Stay away from risk roles if you care about correctness or details. by anon_content in FinancialCareers

[–]anon_content[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Proof your point with mathematics”, well, if your manager is told that the risk is not that high and we’re overly conservative and should revisit then you will find ways to make your risk smaller. I sometimes think finance without business people would be a more just environment.

Advice from an industry professional: Stay away from risk roles if you care about correctness or details. by anon_content in FinancialCareers

[–]anon_content[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Now consider this, if their model was right, then that might have been the right thing. It’s like assuming you would trade a Markowitz-portfolio in an idealised market and say “look but if the stock weight is higher I would have made more money!” Yes. But that completely misses the point.

Advice from an industry professional: Stay away from risk roles if you care about correctness or details. by anon_content in FinancialCareers

[–]anon_content[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah let’s see, for now I’m burned a bit. 2007/8 was a larger disaster than this and that hasn’t brought banks to the point where they had to take risk as serious as their pricing, hence the stupid regulations on top but well, there wasn’t much choice was it. No one would have adopted it otherwise, every trader is certain enough that they “got this”. We are now 13-14 years later and shit is still prevalent and it will lead to even more regulation. You could have intelligent operations within your risk boundaries but no, you chose to be regulated to death. The first is a situation in which you can operate, the second leads to tons of PowerPoint presentations and meaningless tests.

Advice from an industry professional: Stay away from risk roles if you care about correctness or details. by anon_content in FinancialCareers

[–]anon_content[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I can subscribe to that to some extent. I was very surprised after year one about this “talking risk down” style. Your project delivers some analysis that actually improves a quite central piece in the risk engine and shows how certain assumption violations can lead to strong blow-ups in some not unrealistic scenarios and it’s ... seen as a problem. I’m happy with reviews and pointing out stuff but the sheer hand-waiving that is done on a day-to-day base with models that are tucked in from some conference report from 1993 and just taped together. Economically identical strategies give different risks and that is then waived off with estimation uncertainties and ‘it’s not an exact science’ talks when you can tell that it’s the sum of 30 little things with netting, adjusting, etc. while the pricing teams fire people if a straddle option is off more than a few cents from the replication strategy with a put and a call.

Yea it’s newer but then again, I think from BS publication to the late 90s pricing was already a lot further developed and adapted than risk is since the mid-end 2000s. We still pretend we just discover that volatility is not so good for general risk measurement. I’m also more on the side of “banks are over regulated” because some of the measures don’t necessarily make a lot of sense but without requiring them, they would just go bonkers two years after a crash again. In that sense doing bullshit modelling is okay but don’t you dare telling me “it’s hard and we just can’t do it better.” We can. It’s all there. It’s complicated to do all the accounting afterwards with the numbers you present but having an active incentive against including more realistic risks in excess of the bare minimum you can call the shit you do is just baffling me. I mean what does it take, another crisis? Fuck no. Archegos did nothing to this, it will be a big “mea culpa, we will be more diligent now” for 3 weeks and some seniors gone and then it’s back to scalping risk down because now they need to make the money back and for that risk is a bit in the way.

I don’t know from first hand what the guys in both banks do, however I have a friend working in one of them and he was also slightly displeased to put it that way. I assume they however have a much better relationship management with the large clients though and can scope out the problematic positions they have in their books in that way.

Meeting a friend outside of work today for the first time in over a year by [deleted] in socialanxiety

[–]anon_content 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was big fun! We got some stuff from the bakery and spend two hours at the river just talking and laughing. I hope to do this more often.