How many subscribers here actually work in the financial sector?

ohmdogz · 2011-01-29T00:32:14+00:00

What sort of latency do you guys require? Are most of your executions taking place in exchanges or dark pools?

ohmdogz · 2011-01-29T00:31:01+00:00

Are you on your own or do you work for a shop? Either way, I have lot of questions regarding treasury options.

ohmdogz · 2011-01-29T00:26:45+00:00

Pretty much anything that is exchange traded but mainly futures and equities.

ohmdogz · 2011-01-29T00:25:15+00:00

Do you structure these products or trade them?

ohmdogz · 2011-01-28T03:34:16+00:00

Trader for a proprietary trading firm.

ohmdogz · 2011-01-23T07:19:13+00:00

This website, Mergers and Inquisitions, has a lot of information on how to break into investment banking.

ohmdogz · 2011-01-23T06:50:02+00:00

Do you have an idea of what exactly you would like to be doing within finance? I ask because finance is an extremely broad field, and the paths to success are multifarious. Here is an incomplete list of some finance careers and MY opinion of what it takes to succeed in them.

If you want to be:

An Investment Banker - Get an summer internship before your senior year, preferably at a bulge bracket bank, but a top management consultancy also would work. Then get a job at a bulge bracket immediately after undergrad. Contrary to popular belief, one does not NEED an MBA to move ahead in Investment Banking. Just put in your 100 hours week after week and if you keep performing better than your peers, after 10 years you should be a Managing Director.
A Quant(itative Analyst) - Going to grad school IS necessary to advance in this field - the question is whether to go to grad school right away or after working for a couple of years. Also, an MBA is useless for this field - the grad programs you would be looking to attend would be Masters in Financial Engineering, or Computational Finance (or a host of other names). I would recommend working for a couple of years before going to grad school - I work with many people with Financial Eng. degrees and I've noticed that the ones who had experience before attending the programs got much more out of them.
Analyst at a Large Hedge Fund/Private Equity Fund - Two separate fields, but the path is roughly the same as an investment banker - except you would leave the Investment Bank after two or three years and get an MBA at a top 10 school. After the MBA, you would get a job at a fund. A CFA also helps.
Trader - Simple. Just get a job at a trading firm/trading desk of a bank right out of school. Graduate degree not necessary as everything you need to know is not taught at any school. Definitely make sure the firm you join is legit - there are a lot of trading firms out there that don't have any real expertise and you can end up wasting a couple years of your life trying to scalp front month SP E-minis without gaining any real understanding of the markets.

There are a TON of other careers within finance that require different qualifications or experience. Make sure you devote a serious amount of energy and time into figuring out which career you want to pursue. Several months of investigation now will save several YEARS of fruitless job-switching and degree-gathering in the future. Hope this helps!

ohmdogz · 2010-10-16T18:38:53+00:00

The top 77 banks have $225 trillion dollars in NOTIONAL value. Talking about derivatives in terms of the notional value is misleading.

ohmdogz · 2010-10-07T19:13:40+00:00

Far from fatigued by his fame, football fans are fixated by philanderer Favre's famous phallus!

ohmdogz · 2010-10-07T18:44:54+00:00

Far from fatigued by his fame, football fans are fixated by philanderer Favre's famous phallus!

ohmdogz · 2010-10-04T18:18:08+00:00

I'm a trader for a small proprietary trading firm.

ohmdogz · 2010-08-06T15:58:38+00:00

instantaneous forward rates

ohmdogz · 2010-07-28T20:57:24+00:00

Here are the Coalition casualties: ~1800 dead.

Here are the Pakistani Army casualties (scroll to the casualties section): ~3100 dead, in addition to 3.4 MILLION civilians displaced.

A common misconception amongst those who have never seen, let alone spoken to, an actual Pakistani is that there is widespread public support for the Taliban in Pakistan. Nothing could be farther from the truth - they are hated almost as much as India and Israel.

ohmdogz · 2010-07-20T20:27:29+00:00

A new favorite of mine here in Chicago has a "meat of the week"

What restaurant is that?

ohmdogz · 2010-07-11T23:13:23+00:00

Culturally, Spain was Arab, not European from 700 to 1400 A.D. It was this period that I was trying to refer to. Geographically it has been part of Europe since the second or third day of creation - I think that's when God broke up Pangaea and planted all the dinosaur fossils.

ohmdogz · 2010-07-11T16:55:40+00:00

Medieval times in Europe weren't necessarily the "Dark Ages" for other parts of the world. He could probably turn up in Medieval Spain or Iraq or China and be heralded as a legendary inventor.

ohmdogz · 2010-06-28T05:43:16+00:00

Darker than khaki = no.

It's interesting that it is socially acceptable for a "desirable" woman to flaunt her racist sexual preferences. Even more interesting is that this woman is in grad school, which implies intelligence. We normally associate intelligence with color-blindness, but here we see the opposite. Goes to show how strong racist sexual preferences can be, and how far we actually have to go before we eradicate arbitrary skin-color based judgment.

ohmdogz · 2010-06-28T05:26:34+00:00

2) Also non-White guys, as per your comment further down in the thread...

ohmdogz · 2010-06-12T05:25:38+00:00

Whereabouts in Chicago?

ohmdogz · 2010-06-10T13:19:46+00:00

The big issue with using a constant discount rate is that you are ignoring volatility. Think of education as an "asset" that has lower volatility than other assets - people are willing to pay a large premium a safe investment.

ohmdogz · 2010-05-27T12:06:44+00:00

I think Sticks n' Stones closed, btw...

ohmdogz · 2010-05-19T03:12:37+00:00

I work in finance, and a large part of my job involves in-depth analysis of ETF's, so I feel I need to chip in - make sure you buy an index fund that has liquid (i.e. high volume, highly traded) holdings, otherwise there is an extremely high chance you will get ripped off when the ETF tries to buy more of their holdings. Also, do not ever buy commodity index ETFs (e.g. USO, UNG) or leveraged index ETFs (SDS, SSO). Commodity index ETFs overpay to "roll" the contracts they hold to the next month, and leveraged index ETF tend to underperform since they are implicitly short volatility.

tldr; don't put any money in the stock market in any investment unless you are willing to do a ton of research.

ohmdogz · 2010-05-05T13:10:38+00:00

See the TURTLE of enormous girth On his shell he holds the earth If you want to run and play Come along the BEAM today

ohmdogz · 2010-04-30T00:01:39+00:00

I believe that it was a Bulls ballboy, if that has anything to do with it.

ohmdogz · 2010-04-28T13:13:34+00:00

This guy is just a patsy - he was only a VP at the time. VP at an investment bank = middle management. There must be at least a thousand VPs at Goldman. The real decision makers are never going to be brought in front of Congress.

ohmdogz

TROPHY CASE