
HN: I want to trade my finance knowledge for python/django mentorship - zallarak
I wanted to see if someone on HN is willing to mentor me through learning Python and Django. Below are some details on my current skill level, what I’m looking for, and what I can offer. I’m located in San Francisco.<p>I know what I'm offering is limited in value relative to what you are offering me, so I am open to give you anything else I could reasonably offer for this mentorship.<p>Current Skill Level:
I know the basics of Python and have gone through “How to Think Like a Computer Scientist” and written some small scripts. I understand how Django works and have been through some simple tutorials.<p>What I’m Looking For:
I’m looking for someone who could efficiently guide me through learning, i.e. what tutorials/projects/resources I should go through. More a mentor than a tutor. Maybe we’d meet once a week to code small samples. I would email you for help if I got stuck.<p>I do already spend time self-teaching, but I think I could learn much more efficiently through someone else’s guidance. I think this, because I have self-learned a lot of things and have found with a little guidance, things go substantially quicker.<p>What I can offer:
I can teach/guide you through learning:<p>- Account Fundamentals (understanding the 3 financial statements and how they flow together; balance sheet, cash flows and income statement)<p>- Interest theory, fixed income/debt/bond valuation<p>- M&#38;A analysis and Valuation (Discounted cash flow, comparables/multiples, accretion/dilution)<p>- Options/Futures fundamentals (I think there is potentially an opportunity for adept programmers here to apply their skills).<p>- Bankruptcy/distressed corporate situations<p>- Crash course on how to dig through and interpret SEC filings (the only reliable free primary data source if you want to invest in public markets)<p>Why would you need these skills? I think they are crucial if you are:<p>1) An entrepreneur who will ever raise capital or sell your company<p>2) Someone interested in learning how to invest in the public or private markets – this knowledge will serve as a solid foundation/prerequisite<p>3) Someone in optimizing the financial efficiency of their business<p>I’d like to think I am at least acceptably good at teaching. I used to tutor economics, accounting, SAT prep, etc. and have received good feedback.<p>Credentials:
I’ve worked as an M&#38;A/restructuring analyst at a reputable investment bank and have had offers from well-known financial institutions/hedge funds. I’ve also had the fortune to have some excellent mentors in my past. I can provide more details if you want over email.<p>My email is in my profile, I look forward to hearing from you.<p>ADDITION: email added to profile.
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irahul
If you find someone to pair with you, great.

If you don't, finish the django book <http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/> and
start fiddling with Practical Django Projects
<http://www.apress.com/9781590599969>. It's a decent book and gives you a feel
of some real applications.

There always is stackoverflow and mailing lists if you get stuck.

You can also hop in #django on irc.freenode.net. Sometimes people on IRC can
be a bit hostile but if you do your homework before asking questions, they are
generally answered.

You also need to know if you are taking up on a real world project, you would
need to learn other technologies - Javascript for client side interaction,
html/css for UI. Django/Python are just one piece of the puzzle.

~~~
bfe
How significant an issue is it how old these books are? The Django Book is
from 2007 and predates even Django version 1.0, and the "in progress" second
edition on the website has its last update in March 2009. Practical Django
Projects is from 2008. Do these books have enough special sauce relative to
up-to-date Django 1.3 documentation and tutorials to be worthwhile?

~~~
kmfrk
Here is a good answer to your question: [http://www.quora.com/Django/Is-it-O-
K-to-read-Django-beginne...](http://www.quora.com/Django/Is-it-O-K-to-read-
Django-beginners-guides-for-1-0?q=1.2).

~~~
bfe
Thanks, that is helpful. It indicates there were bigger changes from 0.9 to
1.0 than any since then; The Django Book is based on 0.9, so maybe it isn't
worth spending time with now.

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callahad
Just a heads up, the "Email" field in your profile isn't publicly visible.
Instead, you'll want to put your address into the "About" field.

That said, I spent a few months last summer teaching some interns how to use
Python and Django, with reasonable success, and I'd be more than happy to
spend a few hours a week helping you out. My email address is in my profile :)

~~~
zallarak
Thanks! changed it. Nice, Ill shortly send you an email

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biot

      > I know what I'm offering is limited in value relative to what you
      > are offering me, so I am open to give you anything else I could
      > reasonably offer for this mentorship.
    

Don't undervalue your skillset. If I were a python guru, I would immediately
take up the offer and help you out quite a bit for what I would be getting in
return. It's just as true that anybody could go online and learn all that
"finance stuff" as they could learning all that "python stuff". The value for
both subjects is in the mentorship to guide and accelerate the learning. It's
not like you're offering home cleaning tips in exchange.

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jxcole
Cool idea. An exchange of knowledge. Sadly, I neither live in San Fransisco
nor am I an expert in Django/Python. However, I have a general question for
you:

For those of us who are unable to pair with you, do you have any
recommendation on articles/books we could pick up that you think would help us
learn more about finance? Is there a "How to think like a financier"?

Thanks in advance.

~~~
zallarak
Id be glad to. Initially, the best thing to do is master financial accounting.
Any financial accounting text book should do (the one i learned from is unique
to my school unfortunately, but it was an excellent book, if I find a link to
it Ill post it). It sounds tedious, but its pretty important to know this
before anything. If you give me an idea of where you are, I could give you
more relevant resources. If you are starting from a blank slate, this is the
best place to start.

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DanielN
My guess is you will get some emails directly from this post, but I would also
recommend you check you HN office hours ( <http://hnofficehours.com/> ) it's
basically what you're asking for but for the exchange part.

~~~
alnayyir
Thank you for reminding me to bug ez about stewardship of that.

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RockyMcNuts
Been going through a similar process, here are some links

highly recommended - MIT OCW Python course

[http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-
comput...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-
science/6-00-introduction-to-computer-science-and-programming-fall-2008/)

Learning Python, Fourth Edition, By: Mark Lutz
[http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/python/9780...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/python/9780596805395)

Official docs and tutorial <http://docs.python.org/tutorial/index.html>

A couple of others <http://personalpages.tds.net/~kent37/stories/00020.html>

<http://diveintopython.org/>

Django - official docs and tutorial
<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/intro/tutorial01/>

Have started some work with this Django book but jury is still out
[http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-
development/django/...](http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-
development/django/9781847196781)

~~~
ivolo
I am an MIT student, and would not recommend 6.00 OCW. I've tutored a few
people taking 6.00 and found their explanations over complicated and problems
filtered with unnecessary details. Reading a book would be preferable.

------
math
For anyone who is a good self learner and wants to acquire this knowledge, i'd
highly recommend the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) curriculum, which, as
an added benefit, is a (the?) globally recognized financial qualification. The
material is excellent and it's not very expensive to take the exam. Assuming
you don't plan to get into investment banking, just do the first year which is
about 2 months intensive study (+- some factor depending on your base
knowledge). It's a very efficient way to acquire this information.
<http://cfainstitute.org/>

~~~
zallarak
It is indeed, awesome suggestion

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unbracketed
I understand Python gets some mileage in the financial industry, particularly
by quant/analyst types. I'm aware that NumPy and matplotlib see a lot of
action - are there other open source packages that get a lot of traction? Are
there contributions from companies that find their way back into the larger
open source ecosystem?

I came to suggest that as an aid to your learning you could focus your
attention on using, evaluating, and writing Python packages related to
finance. There doesn't seem to be a lot out there:
[http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=financ...](http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=finance&submit=search)

Examining packages like this where you already have a handle on what the code
is supposed to be doing might be a good way to consume a lot of (hopefully
some good, and probably a lot of not so good) Python code. Regardless of if
you find a local mentor, contributing to or writing your own open source
packages should prove to be a very valuable experience. Perhaps you could even
start a package or set of general packages related to finance. Sort of like
what SciPy is to NumPy. (FiPy?)

~~~
zallarak
Id love to do that, once my skill level allows for it. Thanks for the
suggestion.

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megamark16
Hey, I've already got an accountant (sister in law) and lawyer (father) to
help me out, but I'd love to just have you as a friend and person I can turn
to for advice when needed. I work with Python and Django all day (and night,
my startup is built on Django) so I think perhaps I can be of assistance.
Email's in my profile, feel free to contact me, IM me, whatever if you'd like
some 1 on 1 django or python help.

~~~
zallarak
Likewise, and thank you.

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alain94040
I was thinking of trading one day of code against one day from a graphic
designer. Is that a trend, bartering for skills? This could be a great way to
help each other out.

The way I would make sure the bargain is fair is by basing it on time. That's
why I say start with one day. Then it's just a question of how skilled we each
are, but worst case, I lost one day to code in exchange for an ugly design. I
can live with that.

------
geeksam
There's also hackerbuddy.com, which exists to pair up wannabe hackers with
wannabe mentors. Might not help you find someone local, though. For that, user
groups are the way to go. Looks like there's an SF Python Meetup group that
meets somewhat irregularly, and BayPIGgies down in Mountain View (which makes
for a late night on Caltrain, but maybe once a month that's okay?).

~~~
candre717
^^Agree. Check out meetups and hack-a-thons. Contact any hacker spaces if
there are in your area. Look at startup sites and email lists, e.g.
StartupDigest. Go to one or two meetups/ dev. events and make friends. BYOC -
Bring your own code. It helps if you have something started already - show
that your serious.

------
ddispaltro
This is an awesome idea, I love the fact it allows both learning parties "skin
in the game", without a financial incentive.

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SkyMarshal
Out of curiosity what opportunities do you see for programmers in
options/futures? Anything besides algo/hft stuff?

~~~
zallarak
The hft stuff is actually what I'm most skeptical of. I think the barrier to
entry is huge in terms of knowledge and initial costs, unless you are an
outlier. The opportunities are in more basic things. Mixing a decent quant
background with a solid financial background is a potent combination for
succesful fundamental value investing. Creating an automated tool to help
structure the best ways to get equity exposure using options based on live
data is another immediately foreseeable benefit.

~~~
yid
What are those initial costs? Say I have the knowledge or ability to acquire
it, how would I actually go about connecting myself to the great stock feed
via (e.g.) Python?

~~~
zallarak
I don't know. It's something I know very little about. I speculate that you
have to buy a seat or subscribe to a service at a major stock exchange (very
expensive) or work through a third party/broker (still pretty expensive, but
also less efficient). The reason behind my skepticism is that the only people
I know making sustainable (and great) money from it have very deep pockets to
begin with or are huge established players.

I was once visiting at a quant fund where they purchased an office building to
get physically closer to a stock exchange. It was very expensive real estate
and they were a massive fund. They had a lot talented people. Hard to compete
with that.

I also read in the Economist a while ago (not sure if its really true, but its
believable) that hedge funds are the largest consumers of computer processors
in the US. But again, this is something I know very little about. I could be
wrong.

~~~
RockyMcNuts
if you want to play in HFT you want 1) wicked chops 2) collocation with
exchange computers to pick up nickels faster than anyone else (was going to
say sub-millisecond but my knowledge is not that granular) 3) access to
historical tick data to analyze, which is expensive to subscribe to and manage
(was going to say petabytes but my knowledge is not that granular)

The way to think of a big part of HFT is really just automating the old
function of market-making, adjusting the bid-ask on many securities to keep
things in line.

In the old days if you wanted to trade, you called a broker who took it off
for a price, the bid-ask, and you tried not go get ripped off too much. Now
institutions who want to trade look for ways to feed them into the maw of HFT
without getting ripped off too much, and HFTs try to figure out how to get as
much of a bid-ask as possible.

Surely the biggest consumers of processing power are the data centers of
Google, Amazon etc... Places like Goldman have sizable clouds but I don't
think they compete yet.

~~~
veyron
"was going to say sub-millisecond but my knowledge is not that granular" <\--
round-trip times are, to 90th percentile, sub-100-microsecond at colo

"was going to say petabytes but my knowledge is not that granular" <\-- entire
market data is sub-100GB per day.

" have sizable clouds but I don't think they compete yet." <\-- cloud
computing is not used in HFT

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nikoftime
Why not work for BrightScope.com? (financial analytics, python + django devs
on staff)

~~~
StepUpToTheMike
Look up their CEO, Michael S Alfred, on FINRA brokercheck. That's why.

