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Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business by Ernie Chan

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, Brownian motion, business continuity plan, buy and hold, classic study, compound rate of return, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, endowment effect, financial engineering, fixed income, general-purpose programming language, index fund, Jim Simons, John Markoff, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, p-value, paper trading, price discovery process, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, transaction costs

If this happens, it is “back to the drawing board.” You should be able run your ATS, execute paper trades, and then compare the paper trades and profit and loss (P&L) with the theoretical ones generated by your backtest program using the latest data. If the difference is not due to transaction costs (including an expected delay in execution for the paper trades), then your software likely has bugs. (I mentioned the names of some of the brokerages that offer paper trading accounts in Chapter 4.) Another benefit of paper trading is that it gives you better intuitive understanding of your strategy, including the volatility of its P&L, the typical amount of capital utilized, the number of trades per day, and the various operational difficulties including data issues.

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If your trading strategy depends on data or news prior to the market open that cannot be more than 35 minutes old, then you need to either figure out a different execution environment or modify your P1: JYS c05 JWBK321-Chan September 24, 2008 13:55 Printer: Yet to come 90 QUANTITATIVE TRADING strategy. It is hard to figure out all these timing issues until paper trading is conducted.) If you are able to run a paper trading system for a month or longer, you may even be able to discover data-snooping bias, since paper trading is a true out-of-sample test. However, traders usually pay less and less attention to the performance of a paper trading system as time goes on, since there are always more pressing issues (such as the real trading programs that are being run). This inattention causes the paper trading system to perform poorly because of neglect and errors in operation. So data-snooping bias can usually be discovered only when you have actually started trading the system with a small amount of capital.

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The only point to note here is that without an API, high-frequency quantitative trading is impossible. Closely related to the availability of API is the availability of paper trading accounts. If a brokerage does not offer you a paper trading account, it is very hard to test an API without risking real losses. Among the brokerages I know that offer paper trading accounts are Interactive Brokers, Genesis Securities, PFG Futures (for futures trading), and Oanda (for currency trading). P1: JYS c04 JWBK321-Chan 74 September 24, 2008 13:53 Printer: Yet to come QUANTITATIVE TRADING In addition to paper trading accounts, some brokerages provide a “simulator” account (an example is the demo account from Interactive Brokers), where quotes from the past are displayed as if they were real-time quotes, and an automated trading program can trade against these quotes at any time of the day in order to debug the program.

The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management by Alexander Elder

additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, computerized trading, deliberate practice, diversification, Elliott wave, endowment effect, fear index, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, price stability, psychological pricing, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, short selling, South Sea Bubble, systematic trading, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, tulip mania, zero-sum game

Do it in steps, all the way up to your normal trade size. Paper Trading Paper trading means recording your buy and sell decisions and tracking them like real trades, but with no money at risk. Beginners may start out paper trading, but most people turn to it after getting beat up by the markets. Some even alternate between real and paper trades and can't understand why they seem to make money on paper but lose whenever they put on a real trade. There are three reasons. First, people are less emotional with paper trades, and good decisions are easier to make with no money at risk. Second, in paper trades, you always get perfect fills, unlike real trading.

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The easy-looking ones are more likely to lead to problems. A nervous beginner jumps into obvious-looking trades and loses money, but paper trades the more challenging ones. It goes without saying that hopping between real and paper trades is sheer nonsense. You either do the one or the other. Psychology plays a huge role in how your trades turn out, and that's where paper trading fails to deliver. Pretend-trading with no money at risk is like sailing on a pond—it does little to prepare you for real sailing on a stormy sea. There is only one good reason to paper trade—to test your discipline as well as your system. If you can download your data at the end of each day, do your homework, write down your orders for the day ahead, watch the opening and record your entries, then track your market each day, adjusting your profit targets and stops—if you can do all of this for several months in a row, recording your actions, without skipping a day—then you have the discipline to trade real money.

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An impulsive person who trades for entertainment will not be able to paper trade that way because it requires real work. You may open an account with one of several websites set up for paper trading. Enter your orders, check whether they have been triggered, and write down those “fills.” Enter all paper trades in your spreadsheet and your trading diary. If you have the willpower to repeat this process daily for several months, then you have the discipline for successful real trading. Still, there is no substitute for trading real money because even small amounts rev up emotions more than any paper trade. You'll learn much more from even small real trades than from months of paper trading.

Learn Algorithmic Trading by Sebastien Donadio

active measures, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, Flash crash, Guido van Rossum, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, natural language processing, OpenAI, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, type inference, WebSocket, zero-sum game

This code shows that the logic of the trading strategy uses the same code as the for-loop backtester. The create_metrics_out_of_prices and buy_sell_or_hold_something functions are untouched. The main difference is regarding the execution part of the class. The execution takes care of the market response. We will be using a set of variables related to the paper trading mode to show the difference between actual and paper trading. Paper trading implies that every time the strategy sends an order, this order is filled at the price asked by the trading strategy. On the other side of the coin, the handle_market_response function will consider the response from the market to update the positions, holdings, and profit and loss.

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Then, we will use this model to validate our model with the out-of-sample data: When we build a trading strategy, it is important to set aside between 70% and 80% to build the model. When the trading model is built, the performance of this model will be tested out of the out-of-sample data (20-30% of data). Paper trading (forward testing) Paper trading (also known as forward performance testing) is the final step of the testing phase. We include the trading strategy to the real-time environment of our system and we send fake orders. After a day of trading, we will have the logs of all the orders and compare them to what they were supposed to be.

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Choice of IDE – Pycharm or Notebook Our first algorithmic trading (buy when the price is low, and sell when the price is high) Setting up your workspace PyCharm 101 Getting the data Preparing the data – signal Signal visualization Backtesting Summary Section 2: Trading Signal Generation and Strategies Deciphering the Markets with Technical Analysis Designing a trading strategy based on trend- and momentum-based indicators Support and resistance indicators Creating trading signals based on fundamental technical analysis Simple moving average Implementation of the simple moving average Exponential moving average Implementation of the exponential moving average Absolute price oscillator Implementation of the absolute price oscillator Moving average convergence divergence Implementation of the moving average convergence divergence Bollinger bands Implementation of Bollinger bands Relative strength indicator Implementation of the relative strength indicator Standard deviation Implementing standard derivatives Momentum Implementation of momentum Implementing advanced concepts, such as seasonality, in trading instruments Summary Predicting the Markets with Basic Machine Learning Understanding the terminology and notations Exploring our financial dataset Creating predictive models using linear regression methods Ordinary Least Squares Regularization and shrinkage – LASSO and Ridge regression Decision tree regression Creating predictive models using linear classification methods K-nearest neighbors Support vector machine Logistic regression Summary Section 3: Algorithmic Trading Strategies Classical Trading Strategies Driven by Human Intuition Creating a trading strategy based on momentum and trend following Examples of momentum strategies Python implementation Dual moving average Naive trading strategy Turtle strategy Creating a trading strategy that works for markets with reversion behavior Examples of reversion strategies Creating trading strategies that operate on linearly correlated groups of trading instruments Summary Sophisticated Algorithmic Strategies Creating a trading strategy that adjusts for trading instrument volatility Adjusting for trading instrument volatility in technical indicators Adjusting for trading instrument volatility in trading strategies Volatility adjusted mean reversion trading strategies Mean reversion strategy using the absolute price oscillator trading signal Mean reversion strategy that dynamically adjusts for changing volatility Trend-following strategy using absolute price oscillator trading signal Trend-following strategy that dynamically adjusts for changing volatility Creating a trading strategy for economic events Economic releases Economic release format Electronic economic release services Economic releases in trading Understanding and implementing basic statistical arbitrage trading strategies Basics of StatArb Lead-lag in StatArb Adjusting portfolio composition and relationships Infrastructure expenses in StatArb StatArb trading strategy in Python StatArb data set Defining StatArb signal parameters Defining StatArb trading parameters Quantifying and computing StatArb trading signals StatArb execution logic StatArb signal and strategy performance analysis Summary Managing the Risk of Algorithmic Strategies Differentiating between the types of risk and risk factors Risk of trading losses Regulation violation risks Spoofing Quote stuffing Banging the close Sources of risk Software implementation risk DevOps risk Market risk Quantifying the risk The severity of risk violations Differentiating the measures of risk Stop-loss Max drawdown Position limits Position holding time Variance of PnLs Sharpe ratio Maximum executions per period Maximum trade size Volume limits Making a risk management algorithm Realistically adjusting risk Summary  Section 4: Building a Trading System Building a Trading System in Python Understanding the trading system Gateways Order book management Strategy Order management system  Critical components Non-critical components Command and control Services Building a trading system in Python LiquidityProvider class Strategy class OrderManager class MarketSimulator class TestTradingSimulation class Designing a limit order book Summary Connecting to Trading Exchanges Making a trading system trade with exchanges Reviewing the Communication API Network basics Trading protocols FIX communication protocols Price updates Orders Receiving price updates Initiator code example Price updates Sending orders and receiving a market response Acceptor code example Market Data request handling Order Other trading APIs Summary Creating a Backtester in Python Learning how to build a backtester  In-sample versus out-of-sample data Paper trading (forward testing) Naive data storage HDF5 file Databases Relational databases Non-relational databases Learning how to choose the correct assumptions For-loop backtest systems Advantages Disadvantages Event-driven backtest systems Advantages Disadvantages Evaluating what the value of time is Backtesting the dual-moving average trading strategy For-loop backtester Event-based backtester Summary Section 5: Challenges in Algorithmic Trading Adapting to Market Participants and Conditions Strategy performance in backtester versus live markets Impact of backtester dislocations Signal validation Strategy validation Risk estimates Risk management system Choice of strategies for deployment Expected performance Causes of simulation dislocations Slippage Fees Operational issues Market data issues Latency variance Place-in-line estimates Market impact Tweaking backtesting and strategies in response to live trading Historical market data accuracy Measuring and modeling latencies Improving backtesting sophistication Adjusting expected performance for backtester bias Analytics on live trading strategies Continued profitability in algorithmic trading Profit decay in algorithmic trading strategies Signal decay due to lack of optimization Signal decay due to absence of leading participants Signal discovery by other participants Profit decay due to exit of losing participants Profit decay due to discovery by other participants Profit decay due to changes in underlying assumptions/relationships Seasonal profit decay Adapting to market conditions and changing participants Building a trading signals dictionary/database Optimizing trading signals Optimizing prediction models Optimizing trading strategy parameters Researching new trading signals Expanding to new trading strategies Portfolio optimization Uniform risk allocation PnL-based risk allocation PnL-sharpe-based risk allocation Markowitz allocation Regime Predictive allocation Incorporating technological advances Summary Final words Other Books You May Enjoy Leave a review - let other readers know what you think Preface In modern times, it is increasingly difficult to gain a significant competitive edge just by being faster than others, which means relying on sophisticated trading signals, predictive models, and strategies.

Traders at Work: How the World's Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets by Tim Bourquin, Nicholas Mango

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, Elliott wave, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, paper trading, pattern recognition, prediction markets, risk tolerance, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, zero-sum game

The best thing to do is practice. Open a paper trading account, size up the market to find good trades, then take and work through those trades. If you can’t make money in a paper trading account, you won’t be able to do it with a real account, either—no doubt about it. Bourquin: And along those same lines, even if you are able to make money in a paper trading account, that’s no guarantee that you’ll make money in a real account, right? Baiynd: Exactly. There is a different feel when trading with real money, as well as the added psychological stress, and that’s the real kicker. Bourquin: Some people say paper trading isn’t worthwhile, because it doesn’t indicate that you’ll be successful when trading with real money.

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I Index A Average directional index (ADX) Average true range (ATR) B Baiynd, Anne-Marie course offered daily and weekly time frames double-top action Elliott wave Fibonacci future market longer-term investment market internal mathematician moving average multiple time frames new trader paper trading paper trading account real money trading recruiting role retail trading Simple moving average (SMA) stochastic momentum indicator SUCCESS Magazine seminar, technical trading support and resistance swing trade technical analysis technical indicator technical trader trading day Berger, Serge Advance/Decline (A/D) line Apple Bloomberg terminal currency futures daily chart day-in and day-out economic data in equities equities, equity options, and futures extreme candles favorable intraday financial analyst full gap gap trades half gap liquidity injections longer-term positions macro view mean-reversion trade mind off the markets momentum oscillator opening gap positions reversal candle S&P 500 E-mini futures seasonal factors slow stochastics swing positions swing trade technical analysis technical tools time frame trade duration trade futures trading environment trading methodology trading opportunity trend reversal US equity indices watch list Booker, Rob Brandt, Peter algorithmic trading bid/offer spreads candlestick charts chart trader classical charting definition patterns principles closing price charts commodities floor trader cookie cutter approach corn spread corn trader currency futures Diary of a Professional Commodity Trader electronic trading entry point futures trader head-and-shoulders patterns high bar charts intraday charts longer-term time frames longer-term trades long-term charts margin-to-capital ratio margin-to-equity ratio market signaling niche—money management pit trading positions risk management Russell trade scale out short-term charts standard stop-loss swing trader Technical Analysis of Stock Trends trend line volume/open interest profile weekly chart C, D California Institute of Technology Carter, John best trade big volume Bollinger Bands breakeven career day trader dot-com crash down payment financial analyst first trading day five-year learning curve fundamental factors garden-variety trade great traders overnight guaranteed income industry trends Keltner Channels loan documentation Mastering the Trade money build up money management OEX trade options professional trader resistance point retail traders shorter-term trading SimplerOptions.com six-figure income smaller traders success measurement swing trades teaching technical analysis technical approach tech stocks The Disciplined Trader the squeeze time frames time spent TradeTheMarkets.com trading industry trading lifestyle trading philosophy trading place trading slumps volatile markets Certified Risk Manager (CRM) Chicago Board of Trade Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) City Slickers movie Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) Currency Strength Index E E-mini S&P futures (ES) European Central Bank (ECB) Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) Exponential moving average (EMA) F Floyd, Gordon & Partners (FGP) Foster, Alex arbitrary profit targets assignment bear market best indicator buy-and-hold approach client vs. own account contract size economic reports ideal trade long-term trend Monsanto and JPMorgan Chase moving averages news following open positions position size price point profitable trades profit targets S&P 500 shorter-term crossover shorter-term moving averages technical indicators time frame trading options trend follower Williams %R G GAIN Capital Asset Management Gartman, Dennis German, Charles ATR automated trading system backtesting daily chart future market green trade independent trader market portfolio mentors money management moving average price action risk management rule-based approach scaling out screen-based trading software stand-alone type of program system rule trend following definition strategies tools Gordon, Todd Aspen Trading Group Australian Dollar average winner and average loser bank research Blue Chips movie chat room CNBC correlation analysis currency markets currency trade day trading decision making Elliott Wave analysis count methodology E-Trade account Fast Money Floyd, Gordon & Partners (FGP) FOREX.com, senior technical strategist Forex trading GAIN Capital Asset Management, senior trader global market analysis hedge fund initial amount, full time trading investment banks leverage magic methodology market information market makers market volatility Money in Motion moving averages NASDAQ new trader NYSE stocks NYSE trading strategy personal account research reports research time S&P 500 futures schooling share size shortcuts short-term momentum trading short-term traders SOES bandit sports analogies stock-picking service stop loss Strategy of the Day technical analysis technical charts trader quality trading jobs trading style trend lines H, I, J Hemminger, Patrick agricultural futures trading agricultural pairs trading Brent curve calendar spread commodities core position crude curve economic releases E-Mini S&P vs.

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Honestly, I was a tremendous gunslinger, and the only reason I stand here today is because I started with so much money that I was able to lose vast quantities. Eventually, though, my husband convinced me that I had to stop trading and figure out what was going on first. Although I didn’t want to sit out and not trade, that turned out to be the best advice I ever got. So, I began paper trading, and I went from simple to mildly complex concepts, working through them piece by piece. I started by learning moving averages, and from there I fell into Fibonacci after seeing it on a Twitter feed. I knew what the Fibonacci sequence was already, and when I started looking at it, the wave retracements made so much sense to me.

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Implementation Shortfall The implementation shortfall (IS) measure due to Perold (1988) measures the efficiency of executing investment decisions. The IS is computed as the difference between the realized trades and the trades recorded in paper trading. The paper trading process usually runs in parallel with the live process and records all the trades as if they were executed at desirable price at optimal times. The paper-trading system of Perold (1988) executes all trades at the mid-point between the market bid and ask quotes, ignoring all transaction costs (spreads, commissions, etc.). The paper-trading system also assumes that unlimited volume can be processed at any point in time at the market price, ignoring the market depth or liquidity constraints and the associated slippage and market impact.

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At this point, however, the system is still in the testing phase and the system’s ability to send production orders is disabled. Instead, all orders that would be sent to the broker-dealer are recorded in a text file. This testing phase of the system on the real-time data is referred to as “paper-trading.” Once paper-trading performance is satisfactory and comparable to that of the back test, paper-trading is moved into production. Continuous human supervision of the system is required to ensure that the system does not fall victim to some malicious activity such as a computer virus or a market event unaccounted for in the model itself. The role of the human trader, however, should normally be limited to making sure that the performance Implementing High-Frequency Trading Systems 243 of the system falls within specific bounds.

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System Implementation The models are often built in computer languages such as MatLab that provide a wide range of modeling tools but may not be suited perfectly for high-speed applications. Thus, once the econometric relationships are ascertained, the relationships are programmed for execution in a fast computer language such as C++. Subsequently, the systems are tested in “paper-trading” with make-believe capital to ensure that the systems work as intended and any problems (known as “bugs”) are identified and fixed. Once the systems are indeed performing as expected, they are switched to live capital, where they are closely monitored to ensure proper execution and profitability.

Risk Management in Trading by Davis Edwards

Abraham Maslow, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discrete time, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, implied volatility, intangible asset, interest rate swap, iterative process, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, systematic trading, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, Wiener process, zero-coupon bond

For example, an out-of-sample test might analyze whether a strategy is expected to work well under both rising and falling markets. It might also analyze how the strategy reacts to market volatility or extreme events like market crashes. Forward Testing/Paper Trading After historical testing is concluded, the next step in the development of a trading strategy is to simulate the strategy in conditions that are as close to real life as possible. This step is called forward testing, phantom trading, or paper trading. In the paper-trading stage, the strategy is run in real time each day. However, instead of executing real orders, simulated orders and simulated executions are created. This data can then be analyzed for reasonability.

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As a result, historical simulation often doesn’t identify problems associated with the timing of when data is available to the market. Paper trading might identify that the trader assumed that the trade could be executed a half hour before the necessary data had arrived. Paper trading is also a way to help estimate transaction costs that might be incurred in the execution process. For example, a model might assume that the trader might pay a bid/ask spread based on typical market conditions. Paper trading allows the model to observe the bid/ask spread at the expected time of trading under realistic conditions. After becoming familiar with handling the model during the day, it is time to start practicing with the model with limited amounts of money.

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Backtestingg is the process of testing a trading strategy or idea over prior time periods. Out-of-Sample Backtesting. Out-of-sample backtestingg splits the historical data into two portions—a portion that is used to develop the strategy and a portion used to test the data. This reduces some issues associated with strategies that look good in testing but can’t be repeated. Paper Trading. Paper tradingg, also called phantom trading, is simulated trading that attempts to duplicate the actual process of making trades, recording profits and losses, and estimating transaction costs in a live simulation. Live Testing. Live trading is the process of using small-sized trades to test the feasibility of the transaction under real-life conditions.

The New Sell and Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit From Price Declines by Alexander Elder

Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, buy and hold, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, double helix, impulse control, low interest rates, paper trading, short selling, systematic trading, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, uptick rule

Whenever I glance at my diary in Outlook, the yellow labels call attention to themselves, reminding me that these trades are open and I need to manage them. Purple. Planned trade. Once implemented, I drag the icon into the box of the day on which I traded and change the label to yellow for an open trade. Green. Profit. Blue. Profit Demerit. I made money on this trade but less than I should have, or violated my own rules. Brown. Research (a paper trade). Figure 3.4 Trading Diary—DB, Entry, Weekly Chart Most of my diary entries include two charts—a weekly and a daily. Depending on the trade, I might also add a monthly or intraday chart. Figures 3.4 and 3.5 show an example of a diary entry. The weekly DB chart (Figure 3.4) shows the source of a trading idea—an e-mail from a friend who ran several market scans and shared the results with me.

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A good way to set a target for a swing trade is to use either a moving average or a channel. To estimate a profit target for a long-term trade it pays to examine long-term support and resistance. Putting on a trade is like jumping into a fast-moving river. You can walk up and down the shore, looking for a spot to jump in. Some people spend a lifetime on the shore, paper-trading their way through life. You are safe on the shore: your skin is dry and your cash is earning interest in a money market account. One of the very few things in trading you can totally control is the moment you decide to jump in. Do not allow restlessness or anxiety to push you in before you find a good spot.

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If you keep learning from your experiences, you will become a better trader tomorrow than you are today! In retrospect, I could have held much longer—but at the time of the exit there was no clear way of knowing that those rallies would come. There are two sure-fire ways to nail every bottom and top. One is to paper-trade on old charts; the other is to lie about your trades. For the real traders risking real money, fast dimes are better than slow dollars. You have to develop a style of trading that feels comfortable to you and follow it without regrets. Regret is a corrosive force in trading. If you kick yourself for leaving some money on the table today, you will reach out too far tomorrow—and fail.

Paper: A World History by Mark Kurlansky

Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, circular economy, clean water, computer age, Edward Snowden, Great Leap Forward, invention of the telephone, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, lone genius, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, moveable type in China, paper trading, planned obsolescence, trade route, Vannevar Bush

Skilled papermakers were in great demand in other parts of Italy, however, and Fabriano artisans started mills in Bologna, Amalfi, Foligno, Lucca, and Lombardy. Venice, which controlled an important paper trade with Turkey, made no paper of its own because the city was flat and lacked fresh water. But as soon as the Venetians gained control of their outlying region—Treviso, Padua, Udine—they brought in Fabriano papermakers to start mills. All the “maritime republics” also became important paper centers. These were port cities—Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Amalfi—that became independent states grown affluent from trade, shipbuilding, and banking, as well as papermaking and paper trading. The greatest limitation on paper production was getting enough rags.

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The area around Fabriano was well known for its wool production and its mills, built along the rivers, to press wool into felt. Felt was not a new product; the ancient Greeks had made it. Franco Mariani, a paper historian in Fabriano, believes that merchants plying the wool trade to places such as Venice, where the Arab paper trade was prospering, came to learn about paper and started renting the felting mills out to papermakers. This practice soon became popular—sometimes just one or two of the mill rooms were rented out—as almost no change in equipment was needed for the conversion. All that the papermakers had to do was to put metal heads on the wool-pounding hammers to turn them into suitable rag beaters.

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But by the turn of the century, these were commonplace, with illustrated Italian books being printed in Rome, Verona, and Naples, to be followed soon thereafter by Florence and Venice. In Naples in 1485, Sextus Riessinger, a German, printed a much-admired edition of the Greek classic Aesop’s Fables, illustrated with thirty-seven woodcuts for Italian publisher Francesco Del Tuppo. Venice, one of Europe’s most important paper trading centers, quickly became the printing capital of Italy. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Naples had 67 printers, Rome 41, and Florence only 37 despite its dominance in art, Venice had 268. The first Venetian printer was a goldsmith from Mainz, Johannes de Spira. The chief magistrate of Venice, known as the doge, granted him an exclusive five-year contract to print books in Venice, but shortly after producing his first book in 1469, he died.

Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Lopez de Prado

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, G4S, Higgs boson, implied volatility, information asymmetry, latency arbitrage, margin call, market fragmentation, market microstructure, martingale, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, traveling salesman

Such a period may have been reserved by the backtesters, or it may be the result of implementation delays. If embargoed performance is consistent with backtest results, the strategy is promoted to the next stage. Paper trading: At this point, the strategy is run on a live, real-time feed. In this way, performance will account for data parsing latencies, calculation latencies, execution delays, and other time lapses between observation and positioning. Paper trading will take place for as long as it is needed to gather enough evidence that the strategy performs as expected. Graduation: At this stage, the strategy manages a real position, whether in isolation or as part of an ensemble.

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Unfortunately, there is no generic recipe to conduct a backtest. To be accurate and representative, each backtest must be customized to evaluate the assumptions of a particular strategy. WF enjoys two key advantages: (1) WF has a clear historical interpretation. Its performance can be reconciled with paper trading. (2) History is a filtration; hence, using trailing data guarantees that the testing set is out-of-sample (no leakage), as long as purging has been properly implemented (see Chapter 7, Section 7.4.1). It is a common mistake to find leakage in WF backtests, where t1.index falls within the training set, but t1.values fall within the testing set (see Chapter 3).

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT When she was twenty-seven years old, Yan Cheung used all of her savings—a sum of five thousand Hong Kong dollars—to start a Hong Kong–based paper-trading company that supplied paper pulp to manufacturers in mainland China. Five years later, in 1990, she abruptly shut down that growing business and moved to California to start over.1 Moving overseas looked like a huge risk. Mrs. Cheung spoke tentative English. She knew no one. Her list of local contacts was short, and the U.S. waste business was very insular.2 Practically any outside observer would have called her decision to bet her entire savings—again—foolhardy. But within ten years, the paper-trading company she started in California, America Chung Nam, had become the leading paper exporter in the United States—and she was only just beginning.

Stigum's Money Market, 4E by Marcia Stigum, Anthony Crescenzi

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business climate, buy and hold, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, flag carrier, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high net worth, implied volatility, income per capita, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, paper trading, pension reform, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, tail risk, technology bubble, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, value at risk, volatility smile, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Normally, the spread between LIBOR and LIBID is very small, but it can widen because of market uncertainty or illiquidity. As noted in later chapters, LIBOR, because it is the true global cost of money, has become a key benchmark rate in the U.S. domestic money market. For example, in the U.S. commercial paper market, value is measured in terms of the spread at which such paper trades to LIBOR, not to T-bills. In the Euromarket, unlike the domestic market, all loans have fixed maturities, which can range anywhere from a few days to five years or longer. The general practice is to price loans at LIBOR plus a spread. On some term loans, the lending rate is fixed for the life of the loan.

…

To take an example, suppose commercial paper and bills in a given maturity range are normally spread X bp. The spread is now X + 15 bp, which more than compensates for the relatively greater risk and lesser liquidity of the commercial paper. Moreover, the dealer anticipates that the spread at which commercial paper trade to bills will narrow. Then the commercial paper has greater relative value than the bills, and by pointing this out to retail customers holding bills, the dealer could probably induce some of them to swap for a yield pickup out of their bills into commercial paper (to sell their bills and buy commercial paper).

…

Making heterogeneous paper more nearly homogeneous increased the ease with which CDs could be traded, and that in turn increased the attractiveness of CDs as a trading vehicle and, thereby, liquidity in the CD market. However, no dealer agreement—written or, in this case, understood—could make paper trade for long at a level other than that at which the forces of supply and demand determined it should trade. The extraordinary events of 1982 clearly demonstrated this; when both Chase and Contil experienced severe, well-publicized difficulties, no dealer or sophisticated investor thought either bank was in danger of failing.

Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, commodity trading advisor, computer vision, East Village, Edward Thorp, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, the scientific method, transaction costs, Y2K

It is much better to learn the lesson that you can lose everything when you don't have that much money than to learn the same lesson later on. I guess that implies you are not an advocate of paper trading for beginners. Absolutely. I think paper trading is the worst thing you can do. If you are a beginner, trade with an amount of money that is small enough so that you can afford to lose it, but large enough so that you will feel the pain if you do. Otherwise, you're fooling yourself. I have news for you: If you go from paper trading to real trading, you're going to make totally different decisions because you're not used to being subjected to the emotional pressure.

The Secret World of Oil by Ken Silverstein

business intelligence, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, failed state, financial engineering, Global Witness, Google Earth, John Deuss, offshore financial centre, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

A cause and effect of the big price swings is what my lunch companion called “the horrendous development” of a variety of hedging techniques and their growing sophistication.5 At most trading companies, he explained, one desk handles the physical trade in oil and another handles the paper trade. The job of the latter is to hedge the sales of the former, but in the past few decades the ratio of the daily physical trade to the paper trade has gone from roughly 1 to 1 to 40 or even 50 to 1. “People are sitting there all day just buying and selling paper barrels,” this person said. “Everyone knows we need better rules and regulations, but the people who are making money don’t want the rules to change.

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

backtesting, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black-Scholes formula, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, currency risk, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, full employment, implied volatility, interest rate swap, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, paper trading, pattern recognition, placebo effect, prediction markets, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk/return, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, the map is not the territory, transaction costs, uptick rule, War on Poverty

It was completely impulsive. I didn’t sit down and formulate any trading plan. I don’t know where the intuition comes from, and there are times when it goes away. 412 / The New Market Wizard How do you recognize when it goes away? When I’m wrong three times in a row, I call time out. Then I paper trade for a while. For how long do you paper trade? Until I think I’m in sync with the market again. Every market has a rhythm, and our job as traders is to get in sync with that rhythm. I’m not really trading when I’m doing those trades. There’s trading being done, but I’m not doing it. What do you mean you’re not doing it?

…

On the other hand, when you look at all the money I’ve produced over the years, I’ve been vastly underpaid. The more supertraders I interview, the more convinced I become that, at least to some degree, their success can be attributed to an innate talent. Bill Lipschutz provides an excellent example. His first encounter with trading actually involved paper trading in a college investment course. Lipschutz ended up running a hypothetical $100,000 into an incredible $29 million by the end of the course. Although this accomplishment has to be taken with a grain of salt because it didn’t involve real money and the rules of the experiment were flawed by the lack of realistic limitations on leverage, the results were striking nonetheless.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, call centre, clean water, digital nomad, Donald Trump, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, fixed income, follow your passion, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, global village, Iridium satellite, knowledge worker, language acquisition, late fees, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, oil shock, paper trading, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, passive income, peer-to-peer, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

On Monday, call two magazines (expect the first to be awkward) and use the script on the companion site to negotiate, minus the last firm offer. Get them as low as possible and then call them back later to indicate that your proposal was refused by upper management or otherwise vetoed. This is the negotiating equivalent of paper trading.49 Get used to refusing offers and countering in person and—most importantly—on the phone. TOOLS AND TRICKS Sample Muse Test Page The PX Method (www.pxmethod.com) This sales template was used to determine the viability of a speed-reading product, which tested successfully. Notice how testimonials, credibility indicators, and risk-reversal guarantees are used, as well as how the pricing is put on a separate page so it can be isolated as a testing variable.

…

If budget permits, increase the number of related terms and daily expenditure so that the entire PPC test costs $500–1,000. 46. This is a checking account for receiving credit card payments. 47. Set this up using services detailed at the end of this chapter and the next. 48. See the online bonus chapter on www.fourhourblog.com to understand all of these terms in context. Search “Jedi Mind Tricks.” 49. “Paper trading” refers to setting an imaginary budget, “purchasing” stocks (writing their current values on a piece of paper), and then tracking their performance over time to see how your investment would have done had it been for real. It is a no-risk method for honing investment skills before putting skin in the game.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, Arthur Eddington, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, break the buck, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, confounding variable, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, Diane Coyle, diversification, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, double helix, easy for humans, difficult for computers, equity risk premium, Ernest Rutherford, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, framing effect, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, housing crisis, incomplete markets, index fund, information security, interest rate derivative, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Jim Simons, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, language acquisition, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, martingale, megaproject, merger arbitrage, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, Nick Leeson, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, p-value, PalmPilot, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, predatory finance, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit maximization, profit motive, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, Shai Danziger, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, statistical arbitrage, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Thales and the olive presses, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Walter Mischel, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Shaw & Co. had surpassed any contemporary academic research on market anomalies. It had advanced so far ahead that when someone outside the firm approached them to pitch a new trading strategy, they could often guess what it was and what was wrong with it just by looking at its simulated profits. “People would come in with the results they got by ‘paper-trading’ a proposed strategy with historical data, saying, ‘I’ve discovered this amazing effect!’ And we would reply, ‘We don’t want to know what your system is, but if you’d like some feedback, show us what the simulated returns are by month.’ After looking at them, we would sometimes be able to say something like, ‘Your strategy was probably some variant of the following, and this is the financial database you probably used; your simulated profits in this month, this month, and this month are attributable to errors in that database, and your overall returns are artificially high because of the following type of survivorship bias,’ and so on.”

…

Amir Khandani had just come back to MIT from a summer internship and was looking for a thesis topic. I suggested that we try to figure out what happened during the Quant Meltdown by simulating a simple quantitative equity trading strategy.26 A common practice in the investment business is to evaluate a particular strategy by performing a “backtest,” or “paper trading,” where you use historical prices to calculate the realized profits and losses of trades that the strategy would have called for. For example, suppose a superstitious friend tells you that you should never buy stocks on Friday the Thirteenth—is that good advice? One way to evaluate this advice is to compute the average return of the S&P 500 index between Fridays and Mondays for all Fridays that fall on the Thirteenth, and then do the same for all non-Thirteenth Fridays and Mondays, and compare the two averages.

…

., 146, 149, 150 Origin of Species, The (Darwin), 140 Origin of Wealth, The (Beinhocker), 218 Oster, Sharon, 127 overpopulation, 416 oxytocin, 338 Pääbo, Svante, 151 Packard, Norman, 278 pain, 85–87, 378–384 Paine, Robert, 242 pairs trading, 235, 240, 286 Paloma Partners, 237 panic selling, 261 paper currency, 356 paper trading, 285 Parkinson’s disease, 88, 91 parrots, 162 passive investing, 5–6, 224, 249, 263, 265, 270, 278, 282. See also index funds Pasteur, Louis, 165 Patel, Pankaj, 267 patents, 284, 401, 402, 404 path independence, 208 pattern matching, 66 Paulson, John, 224, 227, 314, 318 Pavlov, Ivan, 80 Pelizzon, Loriana, 376 Peltzman, Sam, 206 pension funds, 230, 264, 299, 408, 409, 413 Pentagon Papers, 55 peppered moth (Biston betularia), 138–140, 141 Perold, André, 274 Perrow, Charles, 321–322, 361, 372 pesticides, 358 Pete, Steven, 378 peyote, 79 Pfeffer, Irving, 236 Pfizer Inc., 332, 333, 334 pharmaceuticals, 403–410 phenylketonuria, 147 Phillips curve, 36–37 phi phenomenon, 70 physics, 2, 10–11, 19, 20, 25, 209–215 Picano-Nacci, Boris, 61 Pickard, Lee, 307–309, 311 Pinker, Steven, 156, 173–174 Pisaster (sea star), 242 Pitts, Walter, 131 Planck, Max, 140 plasticity, of brain, 114, 156 pleasure center, 87 Pleistocene, 174 Poggio, Tommy, 41 Poincaré, Henri, 18 poker, 59 pollution, 358 Ponzi, Charles, 5 Ponzi schemes, 334, 344–345, 351, 354, 355, 393 Popper, Karl, 219 population genetics, 216 population growth, 163, 164, 193, 194, 201, 215, 257 portfolio insurance, 273, 274 portfolio theory, 27, 48, 212, 249 positron emission tomography (PET), 78, 110 Pounds, William, 35–36 poverty, 411–415, 416 prediction, 130 Prediction Company, 278 prediction markets, 38–40 preference orderings, 97 prefrontal cortex, 162, 279; damage to, 102–103, 107; dorsolateral, 337, 339; evolution of, 153–154, 163; as executive brain, 119–122; rational functions in, 96, 99, 100, 103, 105, 119–122, 128–129, 154, 337, 339; short-circuiting of, 104, 122, 343; ventromedial, 102, 107 present value, 98 prices, 2, 5, 9; of commodity futures, 20; discovery of, 109; discreteness of, 71; of hogs, 28–33, 34; of wheat, 20.

Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

British Empire, Charles Babbage, disinformation, financial independence, global village, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, paper trading, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, technoutopianism, undersea cable

Nobody who knew anything about telegraphy would be foolish enough to risk building a transatlantic telegraph; besides, it would cost a fortune. So it's hardly surprising that Cyrus W. Field, the man who eventually tried to do it, was both ignorant of telegraphy and extremely wealthy. He was a self-made man from New England who amassed his fortune in the paper trade and retired at the age of thirty-three. After spending a few months traveling, he happened to meet an English engineer, Frederic N. Gisborne, who introduced him to the business of telegraphy. Gisborne was looking for a backer after his failed attempt in 1853 to build a telegraph cable across Newfoundland, with a link to the mainland across the Gulf of St.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929 by Markus Krajewski, Peter Krapp

Apollo 11, business process, Charles Babbage, continuation of politics by other means, double entry bookkeeping, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, index card, Index librorum prohibitorum, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jacques de Vaucanson, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge worker, means of production, new economy, paper trading, Turing machine, work culture

A low card between two higher ones is bridged by the fingers and lost.”58 After the successful introduction of the American Library Association’s card format, the attempt to standardize index card quality once again seems to be accepted by the market. Herbert Davidson is delighted about the successful word of mouth and the growing sales. “We have made a standard never known to the paper trade before.”59 Starting with that “greatest library invention,” the card index, Library Bureau expands its product range bit by bit into areas that are based on a library or archival cataloging logic, yet generate massive economic demands. In 1869, two different file cabinets are invented: on the one hand, E.

A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan by Ben Carlson

Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, endowment effect, family office, financial independence, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, loss aversion, market bubble, medical residency, Occam's razor, paper trading, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stocks for the long run, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto

I found buy and sell recommendations are much easier to make if you don't have to back them up with actual invested capital. I can't blame these analysts, because that's the nature of the industry. But there's something to be said for the emotions that come into play when you have your cold, hard savings invested and not just paper trades or opinions. Being wrong is a much different feeling than losing money. Emotions tend to affect future decisions once you've felt the sting of losses. Finally, independence is of the utmost importance when you are receiving financial advice. Not all analysts are compromised or bad people. Many offered useful research even though their recommendations weren't the greatest.

The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders by Kate Kelly

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alan Greenspan, Bakken shale, bank run, Bear Stearns, business cycle, commodity super cycle, Credit Default Swap, diversification, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, index fund, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, oil-for-food scandal, paper trading, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, the market place

Moreover, a sudden move against the refinery’s owner in the crude or jet-fuel market could wipe out its profit margins. The whole undertaking struck many observers as either a foolish fantasy deal or a capitulation to the idea that it was a failure at fuel hedging. “They must have gotten burned on paper trades in the past,” groused one commodities trader. Ruggles, who was busy negotiating with BP and traders in Alex Beard’s division of Glencore over crude supply contracts for Trainer, took the criticism in stride. He had been disappointed not to bring in a private-equity partner for the refinery investment, which was one of his original ideas for sharing the ambitious project’s risk.

The Global Minotaur by Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Mason

active measures, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Easter island, endogenous growth, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, first-past-the-post, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, planetary scale, post-oil, price stability, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, systematic trading, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

From this book’s perspective, suffice it to say that the famous duo’s politics proved immensely helpful to the rise of our Global Minotaur. Britain’s image as an entrepreneurial society, and all the razzmatazz generated by the cocky estate agents and slick bankers, depended heavily on the City’s paper trades and the rising house prices. These twin bubbles developed for the simple reason that London had skilfully situated itself as a strategic refuelling stop on the migration routes that the world’s capital took to reach New York. Toxic theory, Part B: economic models and assorted delusions The Global Minotaur relied on sympathetic governments standing aside while its mammoth asymmetries were gaining shape.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, clean water, David Attenborough, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Francisco Pizarro, invention of agriculture, Joseph Schumpeter, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, means of production, off-the-grid, paper trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker

According to Joseph Schumpeter, it is not at all unusual for the birth of a new business to be attended by a speculative bubble as capital rushes in, dazzled by the young industry’s wildly exaggerated promise. Every bubble sooner or later must burst—the carnival that was permanent would spell the end of the social order. In Holland the crash came in the winter of 1637, for reasons that remain elusive. But with real tulips about to come out of the ground, paper trades and futures contracts would soon have to be settled—real money would soon have to be exchanged for real bulbs—and the market grew jittery. On February 2, 1637, the florists of Haarlem gathered as usual to auction bulbs in one of the tavern colleges. A florist sought to begin the bidding at 1,250 guilders for a quantity of tulips—Switsers, in one account.

When I Fell From the Sky by Juliane Koepcke, Ross Benjamin, Beate Rygiert

paper trading

The letter of recommendation, however, opened not only the door for him, but also the hearts of these people, who later became my godparents. So it was that along with our home—the Humboldt House—my godfather’s house became one of my favorite places in Lima. My godfather and his family were German too and made a fortune in Peru in the cotton and paper trade. When my mother arrived in Lima, these faithful friends even organized my parents’ wedding. Up to the age of fourteen, I often spent vacations there. I loved that house, built in Bauhaus style, with its magical garden, swimming pool and goldfish pond, in which I learned to swim. In this garden I also sometimes let my tinamous, which I always brought along in a cage, run free.

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

While the revolutionary implications of the New Globalization are being incorporated into thinking about development, twentieth-century mental models linger. The chapter thus starts with a quick overview of that thinking. If nothing else, it provides an excellent springboard for organizing reflections on the new thinking. Note that this chapter builds on my paper, “Trade and Industrialization after Globalization’s Second Unbundling,” but it also draws on the World Bank’s new project, which studies ways of making global value chains work for development.1 Traditional Thinking about Industrial Development Mainline thinking about development has seen three waves—or really two waves and a surrender, according to leading development economists David Lindauer and Lant Pritchett.

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy

algorithmic trading, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, blood diamond, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, corporate governance, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Long Term Capital Management, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nick Leeson, paper trading, Paul Graham, payday loans, Pershing Square Capital Management, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, six sigma, social discount rate, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, upwardly mobile, Walter Mischel, work culture

The computers involved in high-frequency trading buy and sell faster and more frequently than any person possibly could. The industry dates back to the late 1990s, when regulators first authorized electronic stock exchanges. Before then, the bulk of trading in stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange was done through specialists—human beings who walked around a vast trading floor covered with cigar ash and paper trade records. I still remember joining the bedlam of the NYSE floor one day in the 1990s when a law school friend arranged a tour. It was frantic, with men shouting, lights blinking, and phones ringing.1 At the time, a trade was fast if it took less than a few seconds. Today, high-frequency trading accounts for 70 percent of U.S. stock trades.

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

A major strength of the platform are the RESTful and streaming APIs (see Oanda v20 API) via which traders can programmatically access historical and streaming data, place buy and sell orders, or retrieve account information. A Python wrapper package is available (see v20 on PyPi). Oanda offers free paper trading accounts that provide full access to all technological capabilities, which is really helpful in getting started on the platform. This also simplifies the transitioning from paper to live trading. Jurisdiction Depending on the residence of the account holder, the selection of CFDs that can be traded changes.

Too big to fail: the inside story of how Wall Street and Washington fought to save the financial system from crisis--and themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book value, break the buck, BRICs, business cycle, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, Dr. Strangelove, Emanuel Derman, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, junk bonds, Ken Thompson, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, moral hazard, naked short selling, NetJets, Northern Rock, oil shock, paper trading, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, supply-chain management, too big to fail, uptick rule, value at risk, éminence grise

The aristocratic, Yale-educated Lehman had reigned during the firm’s glory years and was a banker to some of the biggest and most important U.S. corporations early in the American Century. By the 1960s the firm’s advisory banking business was second only to that of Goldman Sachs. But because Robert Lehman and the other partners hated the fact that corporate clients would have to go to Goldman for their financing needs, Lehman decided to start its own commercial paper-trading operation, hiring Lewis Glucksman from the powerful Wall Street investment bank of A. G. Becker to run it. When Fuld came on board, Glucksman’s trading operation was beginning to account for a majority of the profits at Lehman. The trading space was noisy and chaotic, with overflowing ashtrays, cups of tepid coffee, and papers piled on the tops of terminals and under the telephones.

…

Henriques, “Lewis Glucksman, Veteran of a Wall St. Battle, Dies at 80,” New York Times, July 8, 2006. Lehman’s history: Charles Geisst, The Last Partnership: Inside the Great Wall Street Dynasties (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 49–51; Auletta, Greed and Glory On Wall Street, 27–30. commercial paper-trading operation: Keith Dovkants, “The Godfather, a Man They Call the Gorilla and How a Banking Legend Was Lost,” Evening Standard (London), September 16, 2008. While this anecdote has been reported previously, the scene and dialogue between Kaplan and Fuld have been reported newly by this author. A brief mention of this event was previously reported by Fishman, “Burning Down His House,” New York.

Systematic Trading: A Unique New Method for Designing Trading and Investing Systems by Robert Carver

asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, Black Swan, buy and hold, cognitive bias, commodity trading advisor, Credit Default Swap, diversification, diversified portfolio, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fear index, fixed income, global macro, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, Nick Leeson, paper trading, performance metric, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, systematic trading, technology bubble, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Y Combinator, yield curve

Rounded target position Portfolio instrument position rounded to nearest block. Trade You should now put on the trade and once completed calculate the initial stop loss relative to the entry price. With judicious use of spreadsheets the above steps can be completed in a few moments. 218 Chapter Thirteen. Semi-automatic Trader Trading diary Here is some paper trading I did using the semi-automatic trading system. All the calculations here have been done with a spreadsheet, which is available from my website. Prices and other values are rounded to make the example clearer. 15 October 2014 Typical minimum spread bets are £10 a point on crude, £5 on US S&P 500 equities and £1 on the European Euro Stoxx equity index.

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

They are closely related and were first presented in Mandelbrot 1997a; see also Mandelbrot 1991abcde. The first tests were reported in Mandelbrot, Calvet, and Fisher 1997, Calvet, Fisher, and Mandelbrot 1997, and Fisher, Calvet, and Mandelbrot 1997. 216 “In fact, this concept…” See Mandelbrot and Taylor 1967. 216 “I co-authored in 1967” In that paper, trading time was not taken to be multifractal, but fractal—but neither term was used because they had not yet been coined. That is, the best I could do in 1967 was to consider the increments of trading time as statistically independent, hence to model the Noah but not the Joseph Effect. The novelty I reported in 1972 was that the Noah and Joseph Effects could be united in an intrinsic fashion. 217 “market behavior” Originally, the function f(α) arose in Mandelbrot 1972, 1974, as the logarithm (suitably scaled) of a basic probability.

Capital Ideas Evolving by Peter L. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, creative destruction, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, diversification, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, market bubble, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, price anchoring, price stability, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Then all prices would clear without variation, everyone would have the same risk tolerance, everyone would earn same rate of return, and everyone would be taking on the same level of risk. To some extent, this process is already well under way. REITs are a conversion of real estate from an asset you can kick to a piece of paper trading in the financial markets. Private equity used to be priced in a negotiation between seller and buyer; now private equity is priced in auction markets. And this transformation is spreading to other formerly nonliquid asset classes like timber and commodity markets in general. When even the measurement of alpha is a matter of debate, the market behavior of any asset class—even stocks and bonds—is likely to be unstable and unpredictable.

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

agricultural Revolution, correlation does not imply causation, demographic dividend, feminist movement, Flynn Effect, illegal immigration, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, paper trading, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

—LU XUN, “ANXIOUS THOUGHTS ON ‘NATURAL BREASTS’” (1927) We’ve been chronicling the world of impoverished women, but let’s break for a billionaire. Zhang Yin is a petite, ebullient Chinese woman who started her career as a garment worker, earning $6 a month to help support her seven siblings. Then, in the early 1980s, she moved to the special economic zone of Shenzhen and found a job at a paper trading company partly owned by foreigners. Zhang Yin learned the intricacies of the paper business, and she could have stayed and risen in the firm. But she is a restless, ambitious woman, buzzing with entrepreneurial energy, so she struck out for Hong Kong in 1985 to work for a trading company there.

The Global Money Markets by Frank J. Fabozzi, Steven V. Mann, Moorad Choudhry

asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency risk, discounted cash flows, discrete time, disintermediation, Dutch auction, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, land bank, large denomination, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market fundamentalism, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, paper trading, Right to Buy, short selling, stocks for the long run, time value of money, value at risk, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

To pay off holders of maturing paper, issuers generally “rollover” outstanding issues; that is, they issue new paper to pay off maturing paper. Another consideration in determining the maturity is whether the paper would be eligible collateral by a bank if it wanted to borrow from the Federal Reserve Bank’s discount window. In order to be eligible, the paper’s maturity may not exceed 90 days. Because eligible paper trades at a lower cost than paper that is ineligible, issuers prefer to sell paper whose maturity does not exceed 90 days. The combination of its short maturity and low credit risk make commercial paper an ideal investment vehicle for short-term funds. Most investors in commercial paper are institutional investors.

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Topping my list are the following: • • • • Electronic market access Market data graphics Spreadsheets Databases and Internet information For quantitative investors, I would add portfolio optimization despite the barriers to wider acceptance of this technology such as sensitivity to errors and unintuitive results (unless they are constrained). Electronic Market Access Thirty years ago, the Designated Order Turnaround (DOT) and NASDAQ electronic systems were concepts on their way to notions. A so-called program trade literally involved wheelbarrows of paper trade tickets physically distributed to floor traders. Today, trading floors from London to Tokyo have been replaced by machinery. Purely electronic markets, the electronic communication networks (ECNs), have come from nowhere to claim a significant portion of volume. Increasingly, the discussion of the future of exchanges is a discussion of technology.

Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused To Let Go by Emily Cockayne

Cape to Cairo, carbon footprint, card file, Charles Babbage, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Morris worm, New Journalism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, paper trading, planned obsolescence, South Sea Bubble

Bois durci offered an alternative: one could simply affix a moulded object, ‘a cheap mode of truly artistic ornamentation’ (according to Viëtor’s own advertisement) ‘suitable for pianoforte panels, &c’.92 This ornamentation featured such delights as ‘Medallions, Shells, Rosettes, Corners, Composers’ Heads, Greek Heads, Lyres, Wreaths, Escutcheons, Bouquets, Griffins, Caryathides’, depicting ‘Fire and Water, The Seasons, Horn of Plenty, Renaissance Frames, Juvenile Musicians’ and other designs.93 Just such images adorned the fanciest pianos on the market: those of Steinway & Sons, from New York, and Bechstein, from Berlin. 40. Lyre made from bois durci, a pressed and polished compound of blood and sawdust, probably made by Fritz Viëtor, author’s own. Since 1880 Viëtor had also been back in the paper trade, rivalling his former partner Ferdinand Schroeder and taking as the base for his business a ‘very spacious’ newly erected warehouse on Fann Street.94 Just as Viëtor settled into these premises, a few minutes’ walk away there was a sale of fire-damaged paper items salvaged from a wholesale stationers after a blaze.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

Some grasped it immediately as a fascinating, all-consuming treasure hunt and others recoiled from it as a dreary homework assignment. Warren’s reaction was that of a man emerging from the cave in which he had been living all his life, blinking in the sunlight as he perceived reality for the first time.16 His former concept of a “stock” was derived from the patterns formed by the prices at which pieces of paper traded. Now he saw that those pieces of paper were simply symbols of an underlying truth. He instantly grasped that the patterns formed by trading these pieces of paper did not signify a “stock” any more than those childhood piles of bottle caps had signified the effervescent, sweet-sour-spicy taste of soda pop that made people crave it.

…

More than fifty new investment funds had come to market, with nearly sixty-five more waiting in the wings.3 For the first time in U.S. history, it became fashionable for a broad group of individuals to own stocks.4 Buffett would describe this phase as resembling “an ever-widening circle of chain letters,” even a “mania,” populated mostly by “the hopeful, credulous, and greedy, grasping for an excuse to believe.”5 In a business that was still transacted through paper trade tickets and physical delivery of stock certificates, trading volume had reached such a level that the market was nearly crushed under the weight of paperwork. Huge numbers of orders were duplicated or never executed, the tickets misplaced or simply thrown in the garbage, while file rooms worth of stock certificates disappeared, presumed stolen, amid rumors that the Mafia had infiltrated the market.

…

The topic of the day was the slump in trading and merger business at Salomon and the $75 million that Black Monday had cost the firm.14 Salomon faced the cleanup from Black Monday weakened by the fact that, only days before the crash, Gutfreund, his moon-shaped face impassive, had head-chopped even highly valued longtime employees, laid off eight hundred people, and discontinued marginally profitable businesses such as commercial paper trading (a backwater of the bond business) so abruptly that the disruption hurt relationships with some important clients almost beyond repair.15 These and the losses from Black Monday were going to gouge a deep hole in the shareholders’ pockets that year. And with that, Salomon’s stock fell into the tank.

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market by Steven Drobny

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital controls, central bank independence, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Greenspan put, high batting average, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, inventory management, inverted yield curve, John Meriwether, junk bonds, land bank, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Maui Hawaii, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, out of africa, panic early, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, tail risk, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, Vision Fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Even though there are 50 sheets that you get every morning, giving a review of what happened or everybody’s views and biases, what there isn’t as much of is the ability to interact with other smart people who are managing money. You said earlier that “talk is cheap.” How do you respond to the notion that writing a newsletter is like paper trading or just cheap talk? The truth is that when you retire, you always have a trade on because you have to manage your personal portfolio.Then it becomes a question of being honest. In my sheet, what I do is have biases and trades. The biases are the talk that tells you where I think things are going.The trades are attempts at finding good risk/reward bets that are not inconsistent with my biases.

The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston

clean water, Commentariolus, dumpster diving, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, invention of movable type, Islamic Golden Age, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, means of production, Murano, Venice glass, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, Suez crisis 1956, wikimedia commons

Richard Daniel Smith, “Paper Impermanence as a Consequence of pH and Storage Conditions,” The Library Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1969): 154. 60. Gary Bryan Magee, Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital and Technology in Britain and America, 1860–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 104–11. 61. Hunter, Papermaking, 538. 62. John Bidwell, American Paper Mills, 1690–1832: A Directory of the Paper Trade, with Notes on Products, Watermarks, Distribution Methods, and Manufacturing Techniques (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), xxvi, 1; John W. Maxson Jr., “Papermaking in America from Art to Industry, 1690 to 1860,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 25, no. 2 (1968): 121; Matt T.

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

The former starts from a macro view of the portfolio, and the latter builds up, trade by trade, from the micro level. • Portfolio rebalance rule. This trading rule looks at the entire portfolio of securities and defines how it is rebalanced. This trading rule is backtested as follows. For each time period, ○ Determine the optimal portfolio of securities. ○ Make a (paper) trade to rebalance to this portfolio. As an example of this type of trading rule, suppose that you find the top 10% cheapest stocks by their book-to-market ratio on the last trading day of each month. You then buy an equal-weighted portfolio of these stocks and hold it for a month. Next month, you rebalance to the top 10% cheapest stocks at that time, and so on.

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth, Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Geldof, Bullingdon Club, business intelligence, company town, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, energy security, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Global Witness, income inequality, kremlinology, Larry Ellison, Londongrad, mass immigration, mega-rich, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, paper trading, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, power law, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Skype, Sloane Ranger

‘It was like a big building block in which there were many apartments, everybody had his own key and was doing his own business with his own premises,’ admitted Collongues-Popova.9 The network only emerged during an investigation by the French tax authorities, which had uncovered large amounts of cash moving in and out of Collongues-Popova’s bank accounts. During the investigation into Yukos, she was asked to go to Moscow to testify but refused because she feared for her safety. In an attempt to clear her name, in August 2003 she sent the Russian prosecutors boxes of documents including corporate papers, trading reports, and bank statements dating from 1996 to 2000. While some of the billions that flew out of Russia and into foreign bank accounts were the result of tax avoidance, a great deal also disappeared through wire transfers, phony import-export documents, oil shipments, and other devices.10 It mostly came from what should have been highly profitable companies providing the backbone of the Russian economy.

Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It by Steven Brill

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, electricity market, ending welfare as we know it, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, future of work, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, immigration reform, income inequality, invention of radio, job automation, junk bonds, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paper trading, Paris climate accords, performance metric, post-work, Potemkin village, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stock buybacks, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, telemarketer, too big to fail, trade liberalization, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

In 1971, the collapse of the Bretton Woods international accords—which had locked in the relative value of major currencies since 1944—accompanied by President Richard Nixon’s decision to let the value of the dollar float freely, created a new market for speculating in the fluctuation of exchange rates. With technology emerging to facilitate trades around the world instantaneously, knowledge workers had new pieces of paper (francs, dollars, pounds) to trade for other pieces of paper. Trading pieces of paper was on its way to becoming America’s prime economic activity, literally. In 1950, the financial industry accounted for 9 percent of all corporate profits. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, except for a brief downturn during the Great Recession, finance’s annual share of total American profits has hovered at about 30 percent, making it by far the largest industry sector in terms of profits produced.

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

The bondholders would tend to accept these offers, no matter how displeasing, because they would find themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place. As Levy explained, these exchange offers are essentially an arbitrage. If a buyer purchased at par a bond which then came to trade at sixty cents on the dollar, he would probably be willing to exchange it for a piece of paper trading at sixty-five cents—especially if he thought his alternative was to be stuck holding the bonds of a bankrupt company. For these remedies to spell salvation for companies in such dire straits, however, they would have to be completed quickly; there was no time for the months-long process of registering with the SEC.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

,” IMF Working Paper, 2007, argues that technological change was more important than globalization, especially on the wages of low skilled workers.) But more recently, Paul Krugman has argued that the impact of globalization may be larger than was previously thought. “Trade and Inequality, Revisited,” Vox, June 15, 2007; see also his paper “Trade and Wages, Reconsidered,” Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, Spring 2008. Part of the difficulty is that globalization is intertwined with the changing productivity within the United States, the weakening of unions, and a host of other economic and societal changes. There is no obvious way to specify the counterfactual: what would the degree of inequality have been, if we had not had globalization, but everything else had been the same?

Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Retail traders No retail trader can succeed with a $1,000 trading account because the income generated from the most successful strategy will be too small to move the needle. Even a 300% return will not be enough to make a difference and so the trader is very likely to employ too much leverage and blow up the account via gambling. A tiny trading account is OK for learning the markets and much better than paper trading. It might give you a sense of the emotional and psychological hurdles that come with live trading, but it will never give you a chance to really know what kind of trader you are. In general, position sizing can account for most issues around insufficient capital. If your capital is small, you need to take smaller positions.

The Great Post Office Scandal: The Fight to Expose a Multimillion Pound Scandal Which Put Innocent People in Jail by Nick Wallis

Asperger Syndrome, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business process, call centre, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Dominic Cummings, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, lockdown, paper trading, social distancing, Wayback Machine, work culture

Lee is convinced the temp had reported misbalancing problems with Horizon in the branch on the Wednesday evening and had either refused to use it until it was fixed, or the Post Office had told her not to use it until someone had applied a fix. Lee believes that whilst the screens were blank on that Thursday morning a remote fix was being applied. After four hours of paper trading, the system rebooted and the temp began using Horizon again. From that moment on, Bridlington’s mysterious balancing problems ceased. Lee remembers something else about the day the terminals were out of use. ‘I’d been up quite early that morning because I was sorting out the newspapers … by this stage I’d handed over the keys to the temp and the Post Office had changed the alarm codes on the counter, so I had no access to the branch at all.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

It was here in 1735 that printer John The early days of stocks and bonds 52 In order to help America finance the Revolutionary War, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton offered $80 million worth of bonds up for sale. Not only did the public snap them up, but merchants also started trading the bonds, along with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other commercial paper. Trading became so popular that in 1792 a group of 22 stockbrokers and merchants gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, signing the “Buttonwood Agreement” and forming the initial trading group that would go on to be renamed the New York Stock Exchange in 1817. In the 1840s, a more individualistic group of stockbrokers forged a similar bond on the curbs of Broad Street.

The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The origins of the exchange lie in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, when Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton offered $80 million worth of government bonds for sale. Not only did the public snap them up, but merchants also started trading the bonds, along with bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other commercial paper. Trading became so popular that in 1792 a group of 22 stockbrokers and merchants gathered beneath a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, signing the “Buttonwood Agreement” and forming the initial trading group that would go on to be renamed the New York Stock Exchange in 1817. The event is commemorated by a tiny buttonwood tree on the sidewalk in front of 18 Broad St (it’s not the original).

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

death of gold coins of IOUs bought and sold by, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 5.1 money for Jewish immigrants collected by Sam Sachs made partner of, 1.1, 1.2 Goldman, Rebecca Goldman, Rosa see Sachs, Rosa Goldman Goldman, Sachs & Dreyfus Goldman Sachs: “Ad Hoc Profit Maximization Committee” at, 12.1, 12.2 Administrative Department of American Cyanamid Corporation lawsuit against annual budgeting at antitrust lawsuit against, 4.1, 8.1 arbitrage department of, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 7.1, 7.2, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3, 12.1, 15.1; see also Levy, Gustave Lehmann; Rubin, Robert bad news not shared by, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3; see also “big short” in battles with other companies board of directors at, 17.1, 17.2, 22.1 bond department of, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 5.2, 10.1, 10.2, 14.1 Bouton’s potential lawsuit against branch offices of, 3.1, 4.1 Broad Street building of, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 Buffett’s loan to, prl.1, prl.2 business department of Business Standards Committee of, 24.1, 24.2 Buying Department of, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 calling effort of capital of, 1.1, 1.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 9.1, 10.1, 10.2, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 16.1 Capital Structure Franchise Trading Group of Catching’s company created for Catching’s power grab at collusion accusations against commercial paper traded by, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4; see also commercial paper compensation at, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, prl.4, 5.1, 7.1, 7.2 competitiveness at confidentiality and nondisparagement agreements at, prl.1 conflict management by, prl.1, 15.1, 17.1 Corporate Finance Department of, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 17.1 Corzine’s desire to enlarge in crash of 1929, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1 Depression strategy of, prl.1, 3.1 discipline at 85 Broad Street building of, prl.1, 8.1, 10.1, 10.2, 17.1 envy of ethical code of, prl.1, 8.1, 16.1, 17.1 Executive Committee of, 15.1, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4 factors in prowess of as family business fear of Financial Institutions Group of (FIG), 15.1, 15.2, 16.1, 16.2, 16.3, 16.4, 16.5, 16.6 fine paid by Firmwide Risk Committee at Fixed-Income, Currencies and Commodities (FICC) at, 14.1, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2, 17.3, 17.4, 17.5, 19.1 fixed-income division of, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3, 13.1, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 16.1, 17.1 Ford IPO handled by, 4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 8.1, 12.1 foreign exchange department of, 1.1, 9.1, 14.1, 15.1, 15.2, 17.1 “great rehabilitation” of, 3.1, 3.2 hot IPO’s distributed by hundredth anniversary of internal e-mails of, prl.1, prl.2, prl.3, prl.4 International Advisory Committee of international expansion of, 8.1, 12.1, 12.2, 14.1, 14.2, 14.3, 14.4, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 16.1, 17.1, 17.2 interview process at investment banking of, prl.1, prl.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 14.1, 14.2, 15.1, 15.2, 16.1, 18.1; see also investment banking Investment Banking Services (IBS) investment trusts of, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 8.1, 9.1 J.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

Alan Greenspan, always be closing, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bolshevik threat, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital controls, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, death from overwork, Dutch auction, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fixed income, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index arbitrage, interest rate swap, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, paper trading, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, short selling, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the payments system, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Yom Kippur War, young professional

He financed his frantic expansion by a staggering accumulation of debt. Later it was alleged in lawsuits that Phillips egged on Burr to borrow and expand too quickly. Whatever the truth, when crisis struck People Express, some bondholders felt betrayed by Morgan Stanley. They not only suffered serious losses, with some paper trading as low as 35 percent of the original issue price, but accused Morgan Stanley of failing to maintain a market during the turbulence. By one account, Morgan Stanley bought People bonds until it had $40 million worth in its inventory. There was a second dimension to the controversy. For two and a half months, as bondholders suffered, Morgan’s M&A Department shopped People to potential customers, exposing the firm to a possible conflict of interest.

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby

airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, equity premium, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paper trading, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, short selling, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tipper Gore, too big to fail, trade liberalization, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

Knowing that regulators could not anticipate where the next shock would come from, Geithner aimed to boost the financial system’s overall resilience. He notched up some considerable victories—in particular, the plumbing of the derivatives market, which had consisted of a frightening mess of unconfirmed paper trades, was modernized, silencing one dog that would otherwise have barked during the 2008 crisis. But Geithner also wanted to increase Wall Street’s capital buffers so that the big houses could weather unanticipated shocks. On this goal, he soon ran up against the limits of regulation. The idea of requiring banks to hold more capital had enthralled regulators, including Greenspan, since the 1980s.