Shit Traders Say

A compilation of colorful, memorable phrases and zingers I heard people in this industry say (mostly buy side quantitative and algorithmic traders) over the years. Inspired by Fred Baba (MIT '10)'s post and ye old @gselevator. Enjoy!

"Let's make some money!" -Anon

"I think we're ready to make some money." -Anon right before the market opened

A: "CNBC says you should not open a family office with only $100 million. You should have at least $300 million."
B: "Do I look like I have $300 million?"
A: "I dunno"

"Oh that's right, I'm already fat." *drums belly* -Anon

"Sushi doesn't spoil. [few hours later] Sushi doesn't survive." -Anon

"How hard is it to order another five or six monitors?" -Anon

"Yeah, that's the monitor graveyard." *points to growing stack of monitors* -Anon

"How far along is your strategy from weaponization?" -Anon

"That bastard! I don't even think he knows what a symlink is! He's a N000B! With three zeros!" -Anon on outsourced IT

"What are the lucky and unlucky numbers in Asian cultures? I want to buy some Powerballs." -Anon on picking numbers on lottery tickets

"Everyone wants to jump in bed with [the head of research], but before you get to the sexy stuff you need to do some grunge work, like cleaning data." -Anon on data aggregation and cleaning

"Kinky bond math!" -Anon

"If there were a game in which I had a positive EV, I would be playing that [instead of sitting at my desk]!" -Anon

"Our long term goal is to take over the world, of course. Actually, only half, because someone else needs to be on the other side [of trades]." -Anon at a market making shop

"That's not appropriate lunch table talk; the interns are here." -Anon on trading strategies

"You work at a hedge fund now; you can pay." -Anon on splitting the check

"I just want to click buttons and make money!" -Anon

"I'm just too much of a type A for that kind of lifestyle." -Anon on "experiencing life" in the 20s

"One ought to enjoy life, really." -Anon on revving supercars in the dealer

"That's what you get for not making me PM..." -Anon on a job offer

"You don't want to be CTO; that's a tech role." -Anon

"I just wanna win, make some f*ck you money, and have my Porsche." -Anon (not yours truly!)

"Pokémon Driven Trading" -Anon on PDT Partners

On regressions:
A: "My regression looks promising!"
B: "What's the R^2 value?"
A: "NaN"
B: "LOL"

On historical data:

A: "What's the difference between 'C' and 'Call'?"
B: *shrugs* "I don't know; it's your data!"

On life goals:
A: "I will become God of this world."
B: "I will have more money than God."

"Screw bucket lists, let's be worth 8 figures and then we'll talk." -Anon

"When someone disappears, either they died or they joined Renaissance." -Anon on Renaissance Technology's 5-year noncompete

"Why do you want to ___? You could be making money instead." -Anon

On the uncertainty of Asian markets affecting US markets:
A: "Was today another ayyyyy lmao day on the markets?"
B: "Lol indeed"

A solicitor walks into the "trading floor"…
A: "Is anyone interested in free nights at a spa resort near Lake Tahoe?"
B: "How did you get in here?"
A: "The back door was open."
B: "[You] Son of a bitch…"

On Starcraft and home life:
A: "You don't have kids, you can practice Starcraft for 6 hours a day."
B: "But I have girlfriend!"
A: "Does she cook?"
B: "No I cook."
A: "Does she do the dishes?"
B: "Yes."
A: "Does she do the laundry?"
B: "Yes."
A: "Does she clean the house?"
B: "Yes."
C: "Sounds like you got the better trade."

"If you are long Bermuda shorts, is that a synthetic equivalent to being short pants?" -Anon

On the announcement of Ken Griffin's divorce settlement:
A: [quoting a comment from the internet] "Ken, from now on, just go the girlfriend route. Hard to weed out the gold diggers once you're past $50 million or so."
B: "Oh you mean the secretaries"

"I was out at dinner with a trader and his roommate. His roommate, who's in law, pays with a debit card. Trader pulls out his Capital One Platinum. I lay down my Amex Platinum." -Anon

"I think you should dump her. Not that interesting." -Anon on a candidate who kept rescheduling a phone interview

"Which animals' testicles have you eaten?" -PM on exotic foods

"Every time I walk by your desk, you have $1,000 in unspent money. Why aren't you spending your money?" -Anon on a game of StarCraft II

"My first instinct was to say 'if someone is thinking this, they probably have bigger issues to address in the first place.' But I once asked myself this in seventh grade, and then moved on with my life." -Anon on whether getting rich is worth the effort

On collecting cars:
A: "Have you considered collecting cars?"
B: "That's not how you stay married…"

"I don't live with 95% confidence intervals." -Anon

"I live and die by the 95% confidence interval." -Anon

"It is politically incorrect to suppress taking liquidity." -Anon

Get the caller to admit he got the wrong number

A friend from college usually answers to phone with a bogus greeting whenever he gets called, since most of his calls are from unknown numbers. I've been meaning to try it out, and got the perfect chance to do so yesterday.

Some unknown number calls my phone. I pick up and clearly don't recognize the caller's voice. He was looking for a "Christopher"; I couldn't hear clearly.

"Cambridge animal control, how may I help you?" I responded.

"Sorry, who is this?" He sounded surprised.

"Cambridge animal control." I reiterated.

"Oh sorry, I got the wrong number." *click*

Success!

Cryptocurrency Mining

This post is a walk down memory lane of the past two months of mining.

Smashing 4 GPUs together doesn't work well at all without hardcore ducting. Turns out that this setup actually mines slower than 3 GPUs and a fan on top.

It turns out that the limiting factor is power density. I wasn't going to buy faster GPUs because of a poorer hashrate per dollar, so I needed to get more PCIe slots. I bought some dumb nodes to get my other pile of GPUs up, but after this fan cutting my hand (and losing a blade in the process), I resigned.

Pile of unused GPUs. These sat unused for the duration of mining.

My two former miners:

tl;dr Making money is hard.

Abusing the C Preprocessor

On a whim, I thought of this idea after reading Cory Li's article on bytecode hacking for Battlecode, MIT's premier Independent Activities Period competition, and after reading some code of his bot, which won Battlecode 2012. Optimized code gets real messy real fast, so wouldn't it be nice if it could be (just a little) easier to write?

The C and sibling languages have a wonderful feature called preprocessing. This feature allows one to insert snippets of text character for character into another file, so as to save time and space writing redundant code. The most prevalent use of the preprocessor is for including header files:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    printf("%s\n", "Hello, world!");
    return 0;
}

Another use of the preprocessor is to define macros. For example, in competitive programming, one iterates from 0 (inclusive) to N (exclusive) reasonably often, so why spend the time to type

for (int i = 0; i < N; ++i)
{
   // ...
}

when it can be compressed to

F(i, N)
{
   // ...
}

all with the simple macro

#define F(i, N) for (int i = 0; i < N; ++i)

Now it's great that C offers this, but what about languages that don't, such as Java? Is there a way to make the C preprocessor do this for us?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes! We can use cpp (that's c preprocessor)

cpp test.c

to find all the macros in our code, as defined by #define, replaces them with the value with which they are defined, and removes the #define. However, it leaves some junk in the code, namely some lines at the beginning of the files starting with #, so we have to remove those before giving the preprocessed file to javac.

So how do we put all of this together? We first write C-ified Java code Test.cjava with our macro

import java.util.*;

#define F(i, N) for (int i = 0; i < N; ++i)

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        F(i, 5) {
            System.out.println(i);
        }
        System.exit(0);
    }
}

and preprocess it with cpp to generate the almost-legitimate Java code. We can strip the aforementioned lines that start with # by passing the output of cpp to sed with a regex that deletes any line that starts with # and redirect the sanitized output to our desired Java file

cpp Test.cjava | sed '/^#/d' > Test.java

Finally, we compile Test.java and run it with java Test, which will produce the desired output

0
1
2
3
4

Probably how to not approach a bank

And somehow we found ourselves in a situation where they decided to invest, and I'm like oh my God this is amazing, and you know we're going through all this process and it happened pretty quickly, we showed up on a Friday, bit of handshake deal on Monday night, so one business day turnaround, which was pretty convenient. And then I had this new problem which was, the finance people are like emailing me like okay please send me your wiring instructions. I'm like wiring instructions, like the only training I had wiring instructions was, I think that happened in like James Bond movies, and I'm like I'm pretty sure we only have like the "my first business" checking account from Bank of America that we set up in the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall, and I'm like so this might be tough. So, Arash and I go to the North Beach branch of the Bank of America, and we we're like well, so you got the teller people, and you got the leather seat people, and we look at each other like, it's probably a leather seat problem. And we sit down and the woman was really nice, she was like, how can I help you, and I'm like is there a limit to how much a bank account can hold? And she was like, well what do you mean? And like I was dressed in shorts and a hoody and Arash was even more disheveled, and I'm like well, can it hold $1 million? And she was like yeah, and so, and I don't know if she thought it was like drugs or this kind of thing happens all the time out here, but both sides very quickly stopped asking questions and we got our routing number and everything and went back, but there is no like startup manual where you are like oh, well here is how that works, and so a lot of it is really, even when you look - at some of these amazingly successful companies and having had a chance to meet a lot of those people, so much of what makes startups crazy is just kind of this iterative process of just having these random things happen to you, or having these ideas and just kind of figuring it out. 

--Drew Houston, "Finding Your Way as an Entrepreneur

[NT] Happy [early] April Fool's day!

Presenting Google Maps for NES:

There's even a sprite for main campus!

UPS Shipping Fail?

I really doubt this is the most efficient routing path; maybe there's a bug in USPS/UPS's package router?

The reason that I needed a second graphics card to drive my triple monitor setup

Nyan Cat Alarm

This is quite possibly the silliest project I've done. Besides nchoosethree.com. Anyway.

The project was simple: to set up an alarm that would wake me up to the tune of nyan.cat every morning. Since I had just set up my lovely iMac G4 earlier that day, complete with my JBL Creature II speakers, I had something that could autonomously play loud and annoying music every morning, at the expense of my roommate's sleep. I could have done this two ways: (A) command line with cron and mplayer, or (B) with builtin Mac OS X apps. I chose the latter because I was lazy. So the troll begins:

1. Get an MP3 of the Nyan Cat song of nontrivial length. I ripped mine from here.
2. Create an Automator workflow as follows:
1. Set system volume to some annoying but tolerable loudness.
2. Tell iTunes to get the selected song (Nyan Cat, in this case).
3. Tell iTunes to play the selected song.
   Then save the workflow as an Application.
3. Create iCal events at the time when you wake up. Set an alarm to 0 minutes before and open up the Automator application. You may want to test this before going to sleep.

There you go! Troll in a box in five minutes! Unfortunately for me, I forgot that my Mac's clock was ahead by three hours, so creating wake-up events at 8:00am meant waking up to mute the speakers at 5:00am. Whoops!

Late night pinball

Possibly yielded me a personal best for one ball:

Yeah, I guess I should have been hubmottering.

Also, Pinball music does not go well with Rebecca Black parodies.

HTOP + Folding@Home

...with 24 threads:

My life is complete.

[EDIT] I ssh'ed into the 48-core box and was greeted with almost 4800% CPU usage:

So beautiful that I want to cry!

Spring Cleaning

My computer needs it.

This thing is so clogged that no air can flow through; the hot air ends up flowing into my case.

 

I always wondered why my 8800GTS ran at 72ºC: now I know why!

Unfortunately, this is the result of running my case with the side panel off. The sad thing is that, even before the dust, my computer will shut down with the panel on after like 10min of intense work. A new case is on its way; I just have to finish modding it!

Apple CSS Fail, Take II

Remember this? Well it looks like Apple is in the process of upgrading the website to be HTML5 compliant, but didn't implement the new CSS sliding window trick yet, as one can see below:

[EDIT] Woah, that was fast! The website is now fixed!

Why do people want to own a Canadian?

Beats me.

Apple Price Discrepancy Fail

Here is Aperture's page on the App Store. Notice the rather low price of $79.

Here is store.apple.com's listing of Aperture.

$120 for a box, CD, and some instruction pamphlets? Really, Apple?

Visiting the Academies

As a good crvft (MIT speak for alumnus), I visited BCA this past Tuesday and Thursday =D Tuesday was for general lols and Thursday was for the Alum breakfast.

Since I don't live in Bergen County anymore, I had to take the NJ Transit bus to school, while everyone else could take the school bus or drive. This sucked because I paid $3 each way for a long and uncomfortable ride, while the same $3 could pay for a gallon of premium gas and the trivial wear and tear on a car. An easy 10-minute trip turned into a 40-minute bus ride + 0.8 mile hike along Hackensack Ave was not fun.

Unfortunately, when I stepped in the building, the deskworker recognized me, so I couldn't slip by without an ID tag. I then went to the former math team room and talked with Nevard, Abramson, Pinyan, and Ben Yang for an hour and also met the new interim math team coach, Jeff Worcjak. After an hour, I went to troll Mr. Sam and saw Alex Lam along the way. Mr. Sam insisted that our poor performance at MIT caused all the early applicants to get deferred/rejected. Then I had lunch at Boston Market, which is now really darn classy for a fast food restaurant.

The afternoon was when all the fun began. When we were done eating lunch, I realized that we were half an hour late for Data Structures, so we rushed there. We then barged in the class, to everyone's amusement, and then I settled down and beta-tested pongmegrenades (still vanilla pong at this point). Topics was right after Data Structures, but we had to leave not long after to prepare for the troll.

What is this troll, you ask? If you recall from last year, the section of AP Physics C that I was in gave Galitskiy hell. Nightmares. Migraines. So as the kind people we are, we decided to replicate that experience by sneaking into his class and taking our usual seats. So at 14:00, about eighteen crvft (people from my section, people not from my section, people who didn't take AP Physics C, and older alum) gathered in the second floor hallway to prepare to invade his class. Luckily for us, Galitskiy didn't have class this hour so we wouldn't disrupt anything important, but he was in his classroom prepping. When he left for lunch at around 14:15, we snuck in the classroom.

Galitskiy then returned and was shocked that he had a full class before class started. Treating the situation as a regular class, he rolled his n-die, which landed on 18, so Scott Lee (who never took AP Physics C) had to present. Luckily for Scott, Fahmid took the stage and started explaining us the dolphin, which we established last year that it could not do physics. A bit before 14:25, the real AP Physics class came in and was shocked that all the chairs had been occupied, so they just took the lab tables as Galitskiy shooed us out. Never have we heard him eagerly say "Guys, get out, it is two twenty-five and I have to teach a class!"

The last item in my agenda was computer team. It was great seeing familiar faces and new faces in the club :3 I decided to give a guest lecture about practical advice (totally not computer science related) as a gift. Unfortunately, setting up the presentation took a bit of work because Keynote complained that my DisplayLink USB to VGA adapter had "not enough VRAM". I tried rebooting the computer with the adapter attached (the internet indicated that this could work), but to my dismay, it didn't. During the reboot process, one of the csteamers asked, "How long will the reboot take?" and I said, "Oh, probably 5 seconds." He began to count out loud, and when he reached "THREE," the Mac OS X desktop loaded. Everyone was blown away.

===

Thursday was the Alumni Breakfast, so I didn't expect to have much trolling time. Nothing much was going on before the breakfast, so I said hi to some teachers again and hung out with crvft and some seniors. During the breakfast I saw some crvft (Julia-san and George Hotz, in particular) I didn't get to see earlier during the day or on Tuesday. George still seemed the same pwnage person he always was (unfortunately I forgot to ask him about USACO). Apparently I'm the first MIT-er that he talked to at the breakfast, after asking approx 10 other people if they "were at MIT." I also talked to Eric Zhang (AAST '00 and MIT '04), one of the freshman biology teachers. He was surprised that I took 6.172 ("the new 6.170") as a frosh xD After about an hour of jabbering, I left to go home.

Bit Hacks are Awesome

What does this code do?

float super_mario_bros(float number)
{
   long i;
   float x2, y;
   const float threehalfs = 1.5F;
 
   x2 = number * 0.5F;
   y  = number;
   i  = * ( long * ) &y;                       
   i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               
   y  = * ( float * ) &i;
   y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   
// y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   
 
   return y;
}

A Revelation

I actually met and conversed with one of my 6.172 TAs today at a VMWare tech talk/recruiting seminar. He gave me some insight on his experience with the dynamic memory allocator project.

``When I did that project, I thought I could write the thing by myself two days before it was due. Turns out that didn't go so well.''

Oops.

Message from (GNU) God

Because I have a CSAIL account (courtesy of 6.172), I now receive ~10 more emails a day, on top of ~50 from my regular MIT account (if you want to contribute, that would be shewu-at-csail). On one thread, someone was asking for help to get matlab/gui tunneling over ssh.

Here was the original inquiry:

May I know that if there's any way to remote access to athena with GNOME? I could set up the graphics xterm connection (using X-Win32), but there's no gdm installed and startx does not work

My purpose is to use the matlab on the athena server for homework... My computer is a 64bit windows and does not support matlab...

Since this is the CSAIL mailing list, several people gave helpful responses and solved the problem within a day. However, this morning, when I checked my email, I saw a response from the GNU God, Richard Stallman:

I am obliged to remind people that Matlab is a proprietary program. It doesn't respect the freedom of those who use it.

There is a free replacement named Octave which does the same job. It does not have the same range of high-level packages, so your help is needed in extending them.

=D

I wonder why Stallman did not critique OP's use of Windows.

I do realize that posting even famous people's emails is rude, but dude, this is the GNU God!

In Times of Desperation

So, this morning, when I poured milk into my daily bowl of cereal, the milk ran out.

Because I can't live without milk¹, I headed toward La Verdes after my biology recitation² to buy a gallon of milk. When I finally found the milk shelf surrounded by a myriad of sodas, I saw the price. $5 for a gallon, $3 for half a gallon, and $2 for a quart. For sake of completeness, the Shaw's near Random House sells milk for approximately $4 a gallon.

Seriously?! The Costco near my house sells milk for $2.25 for a gallon. I can practically get four times the milk for the same amount of money at Costco than from here. So then I thought about the problem some more:

(Assuming that walking costs no money)

Therefore we choose La Verdes milk over Costco milk at this moment, but most definitely Costco milk over La Verdes milk when I have an entire list of food to purchase.

$$Q.E.D.$$

[1] I drink approximately 36 ounces a day; 12 ounces at each meal
[2] completely useless if you have a decent background in the subject or pay attention to the lectures and read the textbook

I CAN HAZ MONO

To partially cure my boredom, I downloaded the Mono framework, a piece of software that allows cross platform programs to be written in Microsoft's C#. Installation was decently straightforward; install the program from an installer in a disk image and you are ready to code. For some reason, the GUI toolkits did not install correctly (but they are on my hard disk), and because I did not look into the problem, I was not able to play with GUI-based applications. Maybe everything will install correctly on my Linux box. I will finally get to use it tomorrow when I go to Massachusetts!

Here is the basic Hello World program:

using System;


public class HelloWorld
{
static public void Main()
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello MonoWorld!");
}
}

But the WinForms and GTK# based GUI applications failed to compile, sadly.

WinForms:

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;


public class HelloWorld : Form
{
static public void Main()
{
Application.Run(new HelloWorld());
}
public HelloWorld()
{
Text = "Hello MonoWorld";
}
}

GTK#:

using Gtk;
using System;


class Hello
{
static void Main()
{
Application.Init();
Window window = new Window("hi");
window.Show();
Application.Run();
}
}

Feedback on my first C# post: Interestingly, I received quite a bit of feedback on my journey with C# all on Buzz. It evolved into quite an interesting thread. [Link]

And finally, here is a bit of programming/compsci humor:

Nope, I do not have mono(nucleosis). :P