
Ask HN: How come so many of you know about stocks/finance ? - Maven911
Do a lot of you work in the field or have degrees in business??<p>Whenever there is a discussion on stocks, HFT, economy, a lot of seem to know about it (more then just a wikipedia search or passing interest...which I would say I have)
======
brc
If you're interested in startups, you've got to know this stuff. The
foundation of just about all business is the capital markets - without them,
the big dollar buyouts and IPOs don't happen. Understanding financial markets
is understanding the foundation of society, and understanding the history of
financial markets is a better roadmap of 'how did we get here' than, say,
studying the personalities of kings and presidents. Sitting in front of your
computer, literally everything you touch and look at is the product of the
organisation of finance through capital markets. Without it, factories don't
get built, shipping doesn't happen, nothing would get done.

Once you understand financial markets, you realise your startup is actually
two products : one is the product that people buy, the other is the company as
a product, which means the company as an investment opportunity. If you
understand what capital markets want from companies, you can design that into
your company to make it more saleable.

Also, any decent undergrad course worth attending should at least cover
finance and economics, even if at 101 level. I don't believe any education in
the modern world is complete until the person has an in-depth understanding of
the importance of financial markets in our daily lives, even if you disagree
with it.

~~~
mkramlich
I disagree that financial markets are the foundation of society. Instead, I
think they're more near the top or to the "side". Closer to the foundation of
society is more basic and primal human needs and wants, and people doing real
work, making real things that other people need or want. Finance is just a
very modern abstraction. It can be useful, but also just another form of
gambling or parasitism. Again, not to say it's not useful to understand. Just
not part of the foundation of society.

~~~
brc
I disagree - if there were no capital markets, there would be nothing to build
your house, or bed from. You would be forced to build your house and eat from
what was lying around in your local area, even if you organise a tribal
organisation to all help each other. You would live a short life and see many
of your children die before their 5th birthday. Because that's how it used to
be.

The dramatic improvements in lives came about at the time of the industrial
revolution, which in itself was partially an engineering outbreak, but also an
outbreak of the abilities to raise and organise capital that had been
perfected by financing risky and long sea voyages, which, in themselves
brought about dramatic lifts in quality of life. No finance, no 'new world',
no USA.

I might add that 'capital markets' cover the entire span of financing, from
angel investing to the big board in New York. The principles are just the same
and the knowledge required is very similar.

You may dislike the capital markets, but you cannot deny that the rise in
standard of living, technology and wealth is not linked to the invention of
both structured lending, pooled risk/reward and ability to trade both equity
and debt to other people. If you meld my thoughts with PG's discussion at
<http://paulgraham.com/gap.html> you can see the rise in wealth and living
standards happening in parallell along with the developments of structured and
tradeable debt, invention of partial ownership and tradeable securities (share
markets) and of pooled risk taking (insurance). I also recommend Niall
Fergusons' 'Ascent of Money' for a good backdrop into how/why this is.
[http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-
World/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-
World/dp/1594201927)

Again, you might dislike the role that markets have, but pretending they are
some sort of bolt-on that could be disposed is very naive thinking.

~~~
asdflkj
This discussion about the foundation of society is like two people arguing
whether the foundation of life is evolution or sunshine. The only real point
of contention is how to define "foundation", and any given answer will stem
from ideology, and will therefore be worthless.

Thanks for that Amazon link--looks interesting.

~~~
brc
He also did a documentary series of the same name, so if you can track that
down, it is very watchable and informative.

~~~
asdflkj
Even better! The whole thing is on Google Video, too.

------
nl
There's a big secret to finance, at least up to some level: It's a _lot_
simpler than you think.

Even things like hedge funds, which are often popularly presented as
impossible for mere mortals to understand are pretty simple conceptually.
(Having said that, some of the specific hedges used can be complicated are
require a high level of economic literacy to follow)

~~~
pyre
So it's more an issue of: 1) understanding how something specific works and 2)
understanding all the related jargon. While both of these might be relatively
simple (at least for the base case) it still takes the time to learn them.
Many of these things cannot just be learned on-the-fly by picking up context
clues in a discussion (though I think that the jargon is a large part of
this).

~~~
edanm
Isn't this (partly) true of programming as well? And in fact, almost every
field?

If someone drops in on a conversation between two programmers, he'll probably
be lost in a sea of jargon, even though they could explain what they're
talking about quite simply if they wanted to (it would take a little longer,
but it could be done).

------
ct4ul4u
I worked on Wall Street starting in the mid 80s and with and on trading desks
since the mid 90s. I've built the technology for equity trading desks and
program trading desks. I was the business manager for a couple of program
trading desks. I've created trading products (most notably a dark pool that
mixed retail and institutional order flow).

I am a big believer that individual investors can't beat CAPM and shouldn't be
picking stocks. I think the ideal portfolio is a mix of treasuries, equity and
debt index funds, and angel investments.

~~~
rjett
"I am a big believer that individual investors can't beat CAPM and shouldn't
be picking stocks."

First of all, hasn't CAPM been shown to be a nice, but not terribly accurate,
picture of how the market works? Among other things, it assumes that asset
returns are normally distributed random variables, it assumes that investors
have homogeneous expectations about the return of an asset (aka everyone has
the same info at the same time and observes the same risk and expected return
of any particular asset), and it doesn't explain variance in stock returns. In
other words, it doesn't accurately mirror reality.

Secondly, while I agree that most people shouldn't be picking stocks, my hair
still bristles when I hear someone say that individual investors can't beat
the market. True, little retail investors are probably at a disadvantage to
the bigger, faster funds out there, but this hasn't stopped a handful of
people from beating the market. <brag>I've averaged 28% annual returns over
the past 12 years. Maybe you would say I'm just lucky though? </brag>

~~~
Sukotto

      <brag>I've averaged 28% annual returns over the past 12 years.
    

Factoring in your transaction costs, how does your investing strat compare to
buying and holding a large index like VFINX over the same time period?

Telling us your returns means nothing without a way to compare to the market
as a whole.

~~~
rjett
What I quoted is after transaction costs. If I go off from Jan 1, 1998 when
the S&P was 975.04 to Dec 31, 2009 when it was 1115.0, that means it has
averaged 1.12% compounded annually.

~~~
eru
Oh, that's not so much.

------
drcode
Lots of techies are single people with low expenses. Therefore they are likely
to have money to invest.

At that point, you really have no choice to learn stocks, since most other
avenues don't lead to much return.

------
tsally
A lot of smart people go into finance and make a lot of money, so I think
there's a general curiosity about their methods and techniques. Unfortunately
the better you understand it the more cynical you'll get. :-p

~~~
tyn
"A lot of smart people go into finance and make a lot of money"...

Any references?

~~~
tyn
If you meant they make a lot of money working as employees (e.g. as traders in
banks that get a lot in bonuses even when they blow everythng up) then my
comment was irrelevant. If you mean that a lot of people make money by beating
the market (that's how i got it) then I would still like to see these
references.

------
bl4k
For some reason, your average nerd often considers themselves to be a part-
time economist. A nerd meeting an economist would likely attempt to argue out
points, where you wouldn't do the same if you met a brain surgeon. It is just
that type of field where you can pick up things in your 'spare time' and sound
smart enough to hold a conversation. It must piss real economists off a lot ..
(I couldn't imagine economists arguing about why RubyOnRails won't scale, but
you see the opposite scenario - geeks/nerds arguing fine economic points, all
the time)

~~~
dreyfiz
Same goes for nerds thinking they're lawyers or judges.

~~~
chopsueyar
...or lawyers thinking they're judges?

...or law students thinking they are lawyers?

------
sgman
It's similar to the question "How come so many people seem to know so much
about politics?"

Low barrier to entry, everyone has an opinion, and since the field is
subjective, there's generally no "right" or "wrong" answer.

~~~
eru
Yes, but in finance you can at least put your money where your mouth is.

------
lionhearted
It's worth starting to learn about at almost any point in your life - (smart)
investing teaches you how to look at numbers, be rational, fight off being
impulsive, think critically, etc, etc.

It's probably good to start learning about investing 2 to 3 years before you
actually have any cash, especially talking with smart people about their
portfolios. Then you can talk to them a year later, if they're candid they'll
tell you how things went. It's interesting seeing my friends who bought trying
to time the market largely got wrecked - one friend lost a lot trying to catch
the falling knife of Indymac and Washington Mutual. Another friend who lives
in Amsterdam is a more fundamental investor, looks at the numbers and the
markets. He invested in Marvel before it got bought by Disney and Baidu after
the crash, and made a lot since then.

Long story short, it's a good brain exercise no matter what, it's a topic that
matters to a lot of people, it's fun, it's very flexible, and so on.

------
quant18
Can't speak too well for other cities, but in Hong Kong, up until very
recently, no one besides hedge funds and grad schools had interesting
programming problems to work on. So if you wanted to be surrounded by good
hackers, you either went into finance, or you were in an M.Phil programme
while you wait for a visa to go to a country where there's non-finance jobs
with interesting problems to hack at.

Fortunately this is slowly changing (after years of useless government
"innovation" initiatives like CyberPort which just turned into subsidies for
politically-connected real-estate developers); we've got more non-finance
companies doing development (and not just sales), like Artificial Life, and
there's more of an entrepreneurial vibe in the air (rather than CompSci majors
automatically chasing after jobs in the big companies).

------
barnaby
It's a complex system. A good gacker loves a complex system.

~~~
Qz
I'm pretty sure that's a typo, but gacker totally deserves to be a real word.

~~~
gfodor
I propose this word be adopted for the up-and-coming geeks of the next
generation who, instead of hacking on silicon, will be splicing genes in their
bedroom. genetic-hackers.

~~~
carbocation
Gacker (n): Someone who plays the game of genetics using both zinc fingers and
stem cells.

------
jfornear
I think it's easy to forget about the diversity we have here on HN. We've got
traders, climate scientists, ex-Marines, lawyers, chefs, etc.

~~~
staunch
FYI: Jarheads I've known prefer that you say "former Marine" and not "ex-
Marine", as "ex" can have negative connotations.

~~~
trafficlight
Once a Marine, always a Marine.

~~~
jfornear
Sorry about that. :)

------
petoveritas
If you are interested in learning about finance and economics, hands down the
best source of learning through osmosis is the Bloomberg On The Economy
podcasts by @tomkeene_ Look into it. All he does is interview really really
smart people from Wall Street and nobel laureates in economics... really good
show where the more you listen to it the more things start to make sense. If
you have questions about other educational resources shoot me a tweet
@petoveritas

------
pbiggar
Are you American? I've noticed Americans in general are really into this
stuff. Most bank accounts come with advanced options like money market
accounts, and its pretty normal for people to have a "portfolio". So I would
say knowing about money is a far bigger part of the US culture than it is in
say Europe.

~~~
ydant
The money market accounts most Americans have access to as part of their
baking account is simply a higher interest rate savings account with slightly
different restrictions. It's not investing by any stretch of the imagination.

I think the real difference is in the US is the feeling that our portfolio
(i.e., our retirement account) is the only thing that will support us when we
can't work anymore. Thus many Americans regardless of how much financial savvy
are likely to talk about their retirement and how much it's been hit by the
recession, the stock crash, whatever.

------
iamelgringo
I founded <http://Newsley.com>. We're transitioning from a social news site
for financial news into a real time search engine for economic and financial
news.

We're in the process of rebuilding the back end right now, so there's not much
to see on the front page aside from a social news site. If you click on an
article's discussion page, you can see some to the semantic entity extraction
that we're doing for each article, however.

To answer your question, when you build a site like that, you end up reading a
lot of financial news, and you pick things up along the way. :)

~~~
rjett
Cool site. I've been looking for something ever since newmogul went down.
Markenomics just didn't cut it as a replacement (mainly because there was
hardly any good discussion there).

One comment about your design: Maybe use a smaller font so I can see more than
3 stories above the fold.

~~~
wmwong
I second this! I've been looking for a replacement for newmogul as well.

~~~
iamelgringo
Thanks, guys. I do need to change some of those font settings. I use huge
monitors at home, so it doesn't really bother me.

The article submitter sometimes crashes, too. Feel free to ping me if you find
any bugs, or have other suggestions. Jonathan@newsley.com

------
rbanffy
I notice many hackers are also interested in law. And politics.

Any complex system that generates interesting behavior out of a set of not
very complicated rules is delightful to hack. If there are rules that generate
rules, it's even more fun.

------
fanboy123
real answer is most of these guys dont know as much as they think. general
coverage of financial topics miss a lot of the big picture.

------
zavulon
Personally, I used to work in finance, so I had to know it - but I think it's
essential knowledge for both employees and entrepreneurs.

Employees - well, if you're planning to make a career in some big company, you
might as well invest in 401K, especially if they're offer matching. And then
you usually get a choice between various funds. And obviously, you need to get
educated about finance, because if you make wrong choices, you could get
really fucked.

Entrepreneurs - obviously you need to be good at that when money valuations
come into play for your startup. And here - same situation, if you're not
educated about how that works, you're gonna get fucked.

And those are just some of the examples of situations you're going to run into
where that knowledge is required.

~~~
btmorex
Actually, you don't really need to know much to do a decent job investing for
retirement.

Invest in a low-cost, index-based stock fund and similarly low-cost,
diversified bond fund. Follow one the many simple formulas to decide what
percentage should be in bonds vs stocks (usually based on years to
retirement.)

What I wrote above will easily beat most of the more complicated plans out
there especially after factoring in cost. You can of course get more
complicated, but you usually only need to get more complicated if you have an
awful lot of extra money which most people don't.

------
jeffepp
I would venture that a lot of us have the ability to pick up these concepts
rather quickly. In addition, for those of us who are self-employed, it is
beneficial to manage our retirement accounts.

I also traded at a options trading firm while in law school. I loved it.

------
aymeric
Would it be because hackers make more money than they spend so they learn how
to invest it?

------
tezza
I seem to be a 'know about finance HN user'[1]. I work for an Agency Broker[2]
in London but the knowledge really comes from:

* How to Read the Financial Pages [3]

* Money Week subscription [4]

\---------

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304249> ,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=667324> and others I'm too lazy to locate
right now

[2] as a Java Dev

[3] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Financial-Pages-Michael-
Brett/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Read-Financial-Pages-Michael-
Brett/dp/0712662596)

[4] <http://www.moneyweek.com/>

------
roel_v
When it comes down to it I don't really know much, just enough to fake it
online - like the other 90% of online posters about complex subjects that can
be made ambiguous without much effort.

------
BrentRitterbeck
I have industry experience as a broker, trader, and currently developing
strategies.

EDIT: My current position is only an internship for the summer as I finish up
my MSFE degree.

~~~
djb_hackernews
What financial engineering program are you in? I've been looking into those
and mathematical finance programs and would appreciate any feedback.

------
nailer
I make infrastructure for high frequency trading desks. Since the algo is a
fairly small piece of code, and the OS is massive, there are big opportunities
reducing latency in firmware, kernels, schedulers, transports, locking
mechanisms, interrupts, and interconnects. Most investment banks are forming
dedicated low latency infrastructure teams now and they're severely in need of
skilled people.

------
brk
You had to do _something_ with all that free money from stock options in the
90's... :)

I have no formal finance experience, just a lot of hard-learned business and
investment knowledge. It also helps that my wife has a degree in finance and
runs the finance group for a tech company, so she and I can talk and discuss
things from different angles.

------
tansey
I work for a hedge fund.

~~~
tom_b
I'd be super-interested in hearing what that's like from a hacker point-of-
view. Is it a big team? Are you doing standard IT work there or far-out,
complex coding? If you're a hacker there, what's the skinny on fun problems in
the day-to-day work?

~~~
tansey
My work life is similar to yummyfajitas. I work in a 4-person fund that was
bought by a 30-person firm (collection of different alternative asset funds),
which makes us semi-autonomous. I'm basically a jack-of-all-trades there, but
80% of my time is model development. When I first started, the fund was still
in its infancy and it was all about creating the frameworks, automating
tedious tasks, etc. Since then it's more about statistics, AI, and lately
saving pennies.

The most fun is being able to watch the market, and have that epiphany where
you all of a sudden have a trading system in mind that you want to try. You
furiously code for the next 30 minutes, compile, debug, input parameters, hit
enter--- and then have your dreams crushed to find "hmm... well if I traded
that, we'd lose 98% in x years." :)

I'd say it's best described as a startup meets online poker. On the startup
side, it's a small team, constantly pivoting based on perceived market demands
for different investment vehicles, and lots more freedom to fail fast with
little ideas. The poker side is where the whole luck factor comes in, dealing
with huge swings due to flash crashes and political speeches.

~~~
wj
I finally created an account just to respond to this.

I would love to hear more about your work (and yummyfajitas). I work for a
company that manages 401(k) plans and haven't had much intellectual
stimulation recently. Modeling isn't something we do to a large extent.

What programs/language do you do your modeling in? Where does your data come
from for back testing?

Any more info about the frameworks, day to day, etc. would be very
interesting.

I'm currently reading a book titled "Algorithmic Trading & DMA" which will
hopefully give me a basis of how market systems actually function and I'm
hoping to build up from there.

~~~
tansey
Languages are pretty irrelevant. I use C# personally just because I like it,
but others use Matlab, R, or Java. If someone came on board and could make us
money in Smalltalk or QBasic, we'd let them use that. :)

Data can come from numerous places depending on your licensing budget. For an
initial analysis you can go to Yahoo! for daily prices; data reliability isn't
great but you get what you pay for there. Bloomberg provides great data
(assuming you guys have a Bloomberg tutorial), but make sure to read their
T&C! They have very strict rules about taking data off machines, etc. Other
sources are places like Tickdata.com and similar vendors whose sole purpose is
to provide you with clean, reliable data.

As far as frameworks go, to be honest most of the code is created from
scratch. My C# framework is around 50,000 lines plus the code for individual
models. It still feels like it's only about 5% of what I want it to be. If I
were to start over again, I'd probably go with R because so many computational
finance people have contributed to it and its graphing/plotting/statistics
features are amazing.

Are you in a position to change how your company approaches modeling? We're
currently expanding into consulting and services as well. If you want to talk
more about that, check my profile and send me an email. We could probably help
you guys get started in the area or work with your team to develop custom
models.

The book looks like it may be really good. Most of what I've learned about
automated execution has been through the long road of trial and error. Most of
those topics in the book are important, though it seems based on the ToC that
the content may fizzle out just when it gets to the good stuff.

~~~
tansey
Typo: Bloomberg terminal _

------
tirrellp
I majored in econ as an undergrad. I have always wanted to be wealthy so I try
to understand how money 'works'.

------
bufordtwain
I want to be able to retire one day, I have no pension, so I figure I need to
know about this stuff.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
For some it's interesting, that's all.

Most of what I once knew about finance I've forgotten. 20 years ago, just out
of college I read a great book: Marcia(?) Stigum, _The Money Market_ and it
really opened my eyes to how banks and investments worked -- at least back
then! I spent the next year or so interested in Finance but then gradually
lost interest.

Money and Finance are important to entrepreneurship, so it's not surprising
that there are a lot of knowledgeable people around here. But one nice thing
about HN is that you could probably ask a question about just about anything
technically interesting in any field and get a bunch of good, informed answers
from people with real knowledge of the domain :-)

------
btilly
I wouldn't claim a deep knowledge of stocks or finance. But I worked in bonds
for several years, and read a few books while I was there. I also have read a
few more books on economics. So I'm better versed than your average person.

------
Maven911
Well I have to say I am pretty impressed by the overall level of knowledge. I
have been interested in business since a kid (use to read businessweek
magazines regularly), and lately I have decided to study for the Chartered
Financial Analyst (CFA) program which I am currently preparing for Level II.

I noticed that a lot of lingo that I learned from the CFA curriculum will
regularly show up in HN comments. Even with a level I background, I don't
think I can talk-the-talk since I don't really work in the area.

I would say that if anyone is interested to learn more about finance, stocks,
economy, the CFA program is a great place to start.

------
jswinghammer
I study economics as my personal hobby. In particular I study Austrian
economics which has proven very useful for me in business and my own personal
finances.

------
djb_hackernews
I can definitely attribute my interest in the markets to my Dad. When I was a
kid he would get home from work and quickly turn on the TV to CNBC to watch
the ticker tape. He was a pretty good stock picker and an unlikely one as a
union electrician and very little education. The passion and excitement rubbed
off.

------
agentq
I am a quantitative analyst at a large asset management firm -- I focus on
risk models and alpha-generating strategies. Though we have separate developer
teams, my job requires considerable hacking.

------
ig1
Spent 18 months working on equity analytics, 18 months on a credit default
swap settlement system and the last couple of years working on high-
frequency/low-latency FX pricing & trading.

------
barredo
Somehow related (2009) article from NYT
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/14/opinion/14trillin.html> (That I personally
enjoyed)

 _“IF you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the
fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.”_

 _“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had
started working on Wall Street.”_

 _“I told you what happened. Smart guys started going to Wall Street.”_

 _(...) That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and
Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street
to calculate arbitrage odds.”_

~~~
tansey
Yeah, that's complete bullshit.

The "smart guys" have been working on Wall St. for decades. Maybe there
weren't as many high-profile funds, but they were there. They were there (and
blamed) when LTCM collapsed, they were there (and blamed) when the dot-com
bubble came, and it should be no surprise that they are still here and being
blamed for the current crisis.

The notion that smart people are to blame for the financial crisis is like
saying tobacco farmers are to blame for lung cancer. The quants aren't the
ones making the laws in congress that have torn down regulation for the last
30 years. They aren't the guys demanding huge increases in leverage (even in
the case of LTCM, where a few of the high-profile quants did get excessive, it
still wasn't their call). They aren't the guys who lowered interest rates or
started the housing bubble. They're the guys who just see an opportunity to
make money and they take it. If a guy cuts off your leg, throws you in the
ocean, and you get eaten by sharks, are you really going to say that your
death was the result of a vicious, man-eating shark?

The people to blame are the usual bunch. It's congress, the white house, and
the executives-- most of whom are not the "smart guys" that are being blamed.

Quants are a scape goat for a bunch of people unwilling to accept that what
happened is not easily traced back to a recent event, but rather requires a
longer look back and a more nuanced answer. It's a lazy answer to effectively
say, "Wall St. gave $70 trillion to a bunch of mathematicians who were just
too darn smart for their own good, dontchaknow." Washington got hooked on
Reagan-era deregulation, where each time they let the banks go a little
further, they got a little more campaign funding, and around and around we go.

There are tons of bubbles and crashes in the history of stock markets. Each
time people think things are different, and they're always wrong. This is no
different than every other time: greed and corruption.

(Disclaimer: I work for a hedge fund.)

~~~
nostrademons
If you read the article he linked, it seems like the author is _talking_ about
decades - he references his 25th college reunion and speaks as if it was
several years ago.

His point was that because the smart guys are on Wall St, they're _not_
actually running the businesses and institutions that Wall St is investing in.
So the companies that back all these financial assets are now being run by
incompetent doofuses, while the people who _used_ to make sure everything ran
smoothly are now shuffling money from one dysfunctional company to another.

There's a lot of truth to this - Warren Buffett has been saying the same thing
for about 15 years. It used to be that the top grads in each class would
become professors, or entrepreneurs, or public servants, and would use their
intelligence to invent tangible things that make people's lives better. Now
the top grads usually go into finance, and they still invent things, but the
things they invent are increasingly opaque ways to slice up a declining pool
of real assets.

Assuming that you're a reasonably intelligent guy, you're actually good
evidence for the point the article is making. If you didn't work at a hedge
fund, perhaps you'd be working for Google, or performing basic research, or
founding the companies of tomorrow. He's talking entirely about opportunity
cost: the opportunity cost of having the smart people in the world
_allocating_ capital is that they aren't out in the world _producing_ capital.

~~~
tansey
I think that's a separate argument from the one the OP is making, based on his
selected quotes. I've read the article before, but I just re-read it to
refresh myself.

The issue I take with it is that the story pitched to the reader is:

1) Life gets expensive and Wall st. produces tons of millionaires.

2) Smart guys go to Wall St. with dreams of making enough money to become
leisurely professors.

3) Extra derivatives are created by smart guys which then destroy the world.

This seems ridiculous on several levels. First, virtually no one goes into
massive debt by getting a PhD in the sciences; scholarships, grants, and
stipends are always there to support bright students. Second, people have been
doing sophisticated derivatives for a very long time; most people have no idea
what an option is, much less how to price one, and that dates back to the days
of Ed Thorpe. Third, I really just cannot believe that having a system where
idiots manage money with the help of other idiots is less prone to disaster
than idiots managing money with the help of smart guys.

The one thing that the author does have right is that the financial incentives
are out of whack. That comes back to the deregulation issue which I consider
the cause.

As for myself, I am also doing a startup and a couple research projects in my
spare time, as well as going back to get my PhD starting 2011, so I guess
Warren can sleep a little better knowing I'm not going to be "wasting" my life
forever. ;)

------
MrFoof
>Do a lot of you work in the field or have degrees in business??

Chalk me up as one of those who works in the field. I'm a developer in the
research department of a quant-shop.

------
Yaggo
I know almost nothing about business or stock markets, but have doubled (minus
taxes) my savings through AAPL in last 1.5 years. :-)

~~~
chopsueyar
Got it at $11.46

~~~
Yaggo
... and sold at $20? :-)

------
Flemlord
I design software for financial advisers.

------
noodle
for me, at least, my parents made sure to teach me finance and about how the
stock market works as i grew up. nothing in-depth, but once i got into college
with an already firm understanding, the rest was just personal research and
interest in the topic.

------
tjmaxal
MBA

------
shareme
When I was a jr accountant and mis person for health care firms I completed a
series 63 SEC license for mutual funds.

I have kept up with finance every since, I guess its part of my interests as
my 2 year degree was double major, CS and Accounting/Finance,

