Category Archives: Finance & Trading

The author meticulously tracks personal finances for their family using a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet, developed over eight years. They prefer this method over software like Quicken and Mint due to issues with account synchronization. The spreadsheet categorizes transactions, aggregates balances, and includes investment tracking, with aspirations for automation.

Moving averages help determine trends and momentum, with basic strategies focusing on price crossovers. Analysis of various periods reveals that longer moving averages typically outperform shorter ones. A contrarian approach, buying when prices fall, yields better returns, suggesting a strategy combining both short and long-term indicators may be most effective.

The author has developed a framework for testing technical trading strategies, allowing users to create indicators, generate signals, and chart results. Despite acknowledging the existence of mature packages, the author shares personal insights on technical analysis’s futility. A contrarian strategy outperformed traditional methods, demonstrating the framework’s utility in backtesting.

The post describes a practical Order and Execution Management class utilizing trading games for engagement. Teams act as market makers trading a synthetic asset based on the class’s average weight. The game emphasizes inventory management and price discovery while tracking profit and loss. Variances in bids lower with repeated rounds, demonstrating market learning.

At the Buy-Side Technology Summit, hedge fund manager Simon Hazlitt advocated for eliminating IT staff, suggesting that cloud computing offers a more efficient and cost-effective solution. His view received mixed reactions, but many industry professionals acknowledged the inevitable shift towards cloud outsourcing. Specialization could lead to reduced costs and increased innovation in financial services.

The author taught an Order and Execution Management class using a trading game based on animal bartering to illustrate key concepts in accounting and market behavior. Teams traded inventory to meet goals under differing supply and demand scenarios. Despite expected correlations between aggression and success, results were inconclusive, prompting suggestions for future iterations.