New Quantnet members say hi

[kean]

I think Andy is right. Trading is getting too complicated nowadays...CFA is not enough anymore unless you are a vanilla trader...no funs though.

MFE is the way to go. I heard that Phd is the status quo though.

 

[martin weiss]

Hey,

I'm currently an Undergrad Math Major on the Actuarial track. What's the main difference between an Investment/ Corporate Actuary and a Financial Engineer? Both price securities, hedge risk, and program.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

This is by far the best student forum that I have ever encountered.

Thank you Mr. Andy. You did a great job.

Thank you for the kind words, Calvin. The credits should go to all the members of our community who make Quantnet what it is today.

By the way, are you anyway related to one of our members kelvinkean ? If so, I can merge both account for you.

 

[kean]

Yes

Thank you for the kind words, Calvin. The credits should go to all the members of our community who make Quantnet what it is today.

By the way, are you anyway related to one of our member kelvinkean ? If so, I can merge both account for you.

Yes. Andy. I couldn't log into my previous user name. So, I created a new one.

My apology. Please merge the old one to the new id. Thanks.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Yes. Andy. I couldn't log into my previous user name. So, I created a new one.
My apology. Please merge the old one to the new id. Thanks.

No problem, I merged the accounts for you. Posts under the old account now belongs to CalvinKean. If you like to get your username changed, let me know. I can do it as well.

 

[vikram]

Hi All,

Just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Vikram and I am a candidate for 2007. I had a great conversation with prof. Stefanica (very interesting guy) today. Look forward to interacting with the community.

 

[Yan He]

Hi, Vikram, welcome to our community. Prof. Stefanica is really interesting guy to talk...and he is magician. You'll find out.
If you have any question, post here, we are all glad to get to it as possible. Good luck.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Prof. Stefanica is really interesting guy to talk...and he is magician.

You can call him "mathemagician"

Hi All,

Just wanted to take a minute to introduce myself. My name is Vikram and I am a candidate for 2007. I had a great conversation with prof. Stefanica (very interesting guy) today. Look forward to interacting with the community.

Wait till you meet him in person

Welcome to Quantnet.
If you can, please introduce yourself a bit (even though some of us know you from GD). If you prefer to use your real name as your username, send me a PM. We all use our real first name as username on Quantnet.

Regards,

 

[vikram]

Sure Andy

I attended the University of Chicago as an undergrad and worked as a derivatives trader at Goldman' Hull Group for 5 years. We did some really cool analytical stuff there. I am just finishing a masters in operations research and have taken most of the classes an applied math masters major would take. I'm looking forward to really getting a strong applied background in financial engineering and would like to get into structured products or exotics.

From a personal standpoint, I enjoy fly fishing and am an avid tennis player, which I regret is tough to do in New York.

As an aside, looks like the link on the website to the refresher courses is down. Any way to get someone on that? Thanks.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

As an aside, looks like the link on the website to the refresher courses is down. Any way to get someone on that? Thanks.

Yes, we notified Prof. Stefanica about Refresher link. We will have it fixed in couple of days. Thanks for the reminder.

 

[Silverpike]

Hello all

Hi Quantnet members. I am an independent quant trader, and I found this forum during a search. I have been trading Forex for about 2.5 years, and I am looking for people to bounce ideas off of. I am hoping I can get some useful feedback regarding some statistical and physics-based trading simulations, because there is almost nowhere else online to discuss these theories.

I have a B.S. from Virginia Tech, and I will be finishing my Masters at the University of Southern California in August. My degrees are in Computer Engineering, and I was a Staff Engineer at IBM before returning to get my Masters degree. I currently specialize in Asynchronous Logic Design, and will am working on my thesis now.

I started trading for myself because I knew it was a challenging activity. I believe that the best traders can use information theory to gain a large edge over other traders, including institutional houses (when done correctly). I hope to use the forums to refine my ideas, providing anyone else is capable of understanding them.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Hi there,

Glad to see a new member join us, specially a trader who we can get some real-world feedback

Ex-IBMer ? Which location ? I was at Watson Research Lab for a year and half. Awesome place to work. World class researchers in a world class environment.

Did you know/participate in the Interactive Broker Trading olympiad ? The results are coming out today. We have a few students took part in it...will be interesting to see

Can you explain the platform you trade Forex on ? Which software you trade on ? Do you trade manually or write some trading algo yourself ? Some of us use Ami Broker through InteractiveBroker's API to trade. Probably will look at TradeStation next.

You can trade here as well. You have 100K to start with.

 

[SteveTownsend]

Promotion

I just got promoted from Junior Quant Analyst to MFE Student (hmm, shouldn't that career path progress in the other direction?).

Found out last week that I have been admitted for part-time study, starting with the math refresher courses this summer. Look forward to meeting some of you in July and the following weeks and months.
Normally I :smt017 on emoticons, but in this case I cannot sum up better than :D

 

[alain]

I just got promoted from Junior Quant Analyst to MFE Student (hmm, shouldn't that career path progress in the other direction?).

Found out last week that I have been admitted for part-time study, starting with the math refresher courses this summer. Look forward to meeting some of you in July and the following weeks and months.
Normally I :smt017 on emoticons, but in this case I cannot sum up better than :D

Congratulations and Good Luck!!! We'll see you in the summer.

 

[Silverpike]

Hi there,

Glad to see a new member join us, specially a trader who we can get some real-world feedback

Ex-IBMer ? Which location ? I was at Watson Research Lab for a year and half. Awesome place to work. World class researchers in a world class environment.

Did you know/participate in the Interactive Broker Trading olympiad ? The results are coming out today. We have a few students took part in it...will be interesting to see

Can you explain the platform you trade Forex on ? Which software you trade on ? Do you trade manually or write some trading algo yourself ? Some of us use Ami Broker through InteractiveBroker's API to trade. Probably will look at TradeStation next.

You can trade here as well. You have 100K to start with.

Thanks Andy, I was hoping you would reply.

You are indeed fortunate if you worked at Watson research center. That is a hard place to get into lately. IBM is spending less and less on research on the whole, and there are fewer opportunities to work there. I worked in the Microelectronics division, at a office in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. I did embedded processor design work for them for a few years.

Regarding trading competitions, I am lukewarm about them. They are nice, but they often don't resemble real trading at all. I notice that the winners often make ridiculous trades that no sane person would make with real money. Similarly, there is often nothing to learn by watching the traders trade. These contests end up nothing more than entertainment to me, which is a shame. I don't know of a way to improve this, other than place limits on the amount of leverage traders use.

Regarding Forex, I trade with Oanda. From an end user point of view, there are 2 major choices: spot market or CME futures. The spot market is highly unregulated, and is something of a dangerous environment for traders. The spot market is also divided into 2 groups, ECNs and "bucket shops" (retail brokers). Oanda is a retail broker. My style of trading can be somewhat long term, so I don't use futures (requires quarterly rollover). Oanda has their own API for automated trading which I have licensed, but I have not yet implemented a solid automated system yet. I still do discretional trading for now.

InteractiveBrokers is an excellent platform. They are an ECN, so in theory the pricing is more stable. However, I know that in the Forex market it can be hard to get filled properly with IB (a platform quirk I believe). I tend to shy away from full retail software like Tradestation and eSignal, because in Forex I believe the benefits are much less than securities.

Anyways, I have a lot to say on the subject. Perhaps if you are still curious, you can make a post in one of the financial forums.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

I just got promoted from Junior Quant Analyst to MFE Student (hmm, shouldn't that career path progress in the other direction?).

Found out last week that I have been admitted for part-time study, starting with the math refresher courses this summer. Look forward to meeting some of you in July and the following weeks and months.
Normally I :smt017 on emoticons, but in this case I cannot sum up better than :D

Steve,

This is awesome news. A big hearty congratulations from all of us !!!

You should be proud to get into the program this year (going on reverse from VP to Quantnet Junior Quant Analyst to MFE student and all that ). This year, it's too tough to get a seat in our program.

I'm, for one, very excited about you joining our program. I think this is wonderful to have your experience added to our students. I'm sure each of us can learn much from you.

Be prepared to put in sleepless nights, countless hours doing very hard homeworks. Finally, make sure you have fun in our program. Nothing is worth doing without some fun.

 

[Andy Nguyen]

Thanks Andy, I was hoping you would reply.
Anyways, I have a lot to say on the subject. Perhaps if you are still curious, you can make a post in one of the financial forums.

I love to get to know our new members. I hope that we can offer something to interest our new members.

As you mention, it would be so awesome if you can start a thread on the Forex topic. I hope you can touch on the following topics.

• Your system setup (hardware/software). A pic of your trading station would be niceeee
• Your take on the forex market: where you think potential upwinds are
• Common pitfall faced by new comers to the Forex market.

We are discussing about doing a project in Forex algo trading during summer. Hopefully we can apply what we learn to the future trading contests.

What do you say ?

 

[Silverpike]

I love to get to know our new members. I hope that we can offer something to interest our new members.

As you mention, it would be so awesome if you can start a thread on the Forex topic. I hope you can touch on the following topics.

• Your system setup (hardware/software). A pic of your trading station would be niceeee
• Your take on the forex market: where you think potential upwinds are
• Common pitfall faced by new comers to the Forex market.

We are discussing about doing a project in Forex algo trading during summer. Hopefully we can apply what we learn to the future trading contests.

What do you say ?

I will be happy to. I am under some tight constraints this week with my thesis, so it will have to get put off until the weekend, or after. I will get around to it for sure.

Forex is a complicated subject, mostly because the market dynamics are little different from stocks and derivatives. There is definitely some background education required in order to trade it successfully.

 

[Erica]

re the downgrading of Steve Townsend

Congratulations to you on your demotion. I'd wish you luck, but I don't think you need it.

 

[Vic_Siqiao]

call me Vic for short


Education: BS Economics Nanjing Univ.,China, expected in Jun.2007
GPA 3.6/4.0
GMAT 770/99%, GRE MATH SUB. 750/81%

Awards: CFA Society Scholarship,2007 winner.
State 2rd Prize, China Undergraduate Mathematics Contest in Modeling.

Graduate thesis: Pricing a class of discrete lookback options( on work and encounter some difficulties in modeling,but i hope to keep on and can be able to solve it finally.)

No W/E, an intern and some unformal experiences in a research institute of an local securities company. mainly did some assistant work on report the CRAZY warrant market in China ( im sure everybody here cant immagine that a deep OTM put warrant in China's market has a volatility of 120% !!!!!) American analysts just cannt understand those professionals in China.

C++: im also interested in programming languages and got to know C++ in my freshmen year. my main problem is that i havent practised too much on it, BUT i have kpet programming C++ 100 rows everyday for a few days and hope to keep on and gain 10k rows more experiences on C++ before i get to Baruch.

Other interest: football, im football captain of my undergrat department and i once led them win a championship in our univ.




Finally, say hi to all students in Baruch and thanks to Dan, i think i will be here in Aug. also i have
to thank Pro. Kwok in HKUST who once had very nice talks with me for one whole day and also gave me admission to their Fin_Math program which i will not finally accept. To me, NY is more attractive, i feel so sorry to him,really.


Last thing:
i have to note that we cant reach "quantnet" in mainland China and i guess maybe this website has been forbidden to browse by China's Government( i dont know why). have any sensitive or offensive words appreared here? Today i get here by using a free American proxy server, very unconvenient.