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Trading the Markets With FOSS Software?
Robert writes "Along with many other techies, I share an interest in the world of finance (bubble-era stock options pulled me in). Unfortunately, as someone with a strong preference for GNU/Linux as my operating system of choice, I have found that software in this area seems quite sparse. For awhile I have made do with Python, R, Gnumeric, Gnucash and a telephone, along with some small utilities I have written myself. What I would like to know is: what FOSS software do you use for financial analysis, trading, system development, and testing in a Un*x environment? Are there programs you would like to see written or ported? Do any brokerages, data providers, or other services provide good support for we the few? And finally, what commercial entities do you know of that are using FOSS software in their operation?"
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Anonymous Coward
is a dartboard.
It's unfortunately not available on most distros, but building yourself isn't too hard.
The dependencies are merely a wall, and Newton's three laws of motion.
SEE
Lehman, Merrill, AIG, HBOS all used lots of FOSS IIRC.
Screw automated trading; screw Ben Bernanke, screw McCain-Bush. I'm going to be foreclosed because I lost my job in the operations dept at Merrill and I can't refinance my mortgage. Why should they get a bailout? Quants screwed over my life and I want them to pay.
I've started looking at this too as i've picked up some stock recently, and it is a difficult proposition (given that i'm not really willing to pay for a commercial solution).
Personally, I absolutely love the interface of Google's stock ticker - the interface is nice, the information is top notch. The problem being of course that there's way in any of the nine layers i'd trust google with my portfolio information. The big advantage of a local program in my mind is that the information you put in, even if it is only "I want to track these stocks" is kept wholly to yourself and not stored on some remote server where you have to trust the hoster not to take a peek.
In the end i've been using the default stock program that came on the iPhone to watch the stock prices. Thats all it will do, that and a short graph history, and it uses the yahoo info instead of the google, but it's close to realtime and it's stored (I hope) on the iPhone. Course, Yahoo can still see which stocks i'm requesting, so maybe in the end it makes no difference.
Ideal would be a device-based solution that could draw down the information, either from google/yahoo or direct from the *sx, and hold information regarding you portfolio too - but locally, so theres no worry of the monetary values being shunted across the net to the infovores.
Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
There is none. You will get lots of recommendations to "hack it" with a hodgepodge of crap like the one you seem to be using right now, but that gets you nowhere.
There is no quality trading/management trading software on any OS other than Windows that bears even a passing mention.
Posting AC because people around here tend to get tender and defensive when someone dares suggest that their techno-religious experience is not absolutely perfect for everyone in the planet. Email and surfing the web? Linux is great. This? Don't waste your time and just stick with Windows.
(cue twitter to tell me how I "hate freedom")
EclipseTrader is probably the most advanced open source trading program. It interfaces with some trading platforms and intra-day data feeds. It has several hundred technical indicators. It also is very expandable and easy to write modules for (in Java). I wrote some technical analysis modules for the back-testing system and was fairly impressed with how well it worked as it is based on the very solid OSGI/Eclipse model. I'd say it actually competes fairly well with some of the proprietary trading platforms I have used, especially if you are a Java coder and want to add modules to it to aid in implementing your particular trading style.
They have a huge pair of Linux data centers... but that said - I do all my financial analysis with web tools from my bank and Online Brokerage.
I understand that the submitter doesn't know what is out there, but if you ever have a trading account you're likely to have API access to your broker's systems. I recommend Interactive Brokers as their TWS software has a lot of different language bindings.
In finance you don't look for "FOSS" tools, you go to your broker, get API access, and write them yourself.
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There's quite a decent (altough not very polished) charting + technical analysis program for Linux called Qtstalker: http://qtstalker.sourceforge.net/ . You can import stock quotes from Yahoo finance or other sources automatically, or commodity/stock data from .csv files, which most data suppliers offer for download.
Friend, as long as there is capitalism or closed source, the FOSS movement will have to be compatible with it. You wouldn't say that Samba is a crime against humanity, now would you?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Interactive Brokers has a Java based client which runs nicely in linux. It provides an API for C++ and Java to execute trades and get data. OpenTick provides historical data and realtime data via an API in Java or C++.
It is not open source, but it does run in Linux.
Is there anywhere a small can find a computerised market in the first place? Are there firms who allow specifies a communications protocol and lets you to trade by computer or does one have to do web scraping to automate things?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Interactive Brokers has a Java-based
Trader Workstation ("TWS") and they explicitly support Linux. They offer almost anything you can get anywhere, including mutual funds, stocks, options, futures (commodity & financial), currency, and foreign stocks. Commissions are 10x lower than Charles Schwab if you trade often (if you don't then a minimum monthly commission kicks in).
TWS is a large, cumbersome Java applet, but it works tolerably well on a fast machine (and there's not much alternative on Linux)
One annoyance is that they only support jdk 1.5.0_x (not the current 1.6.x), I think because of some concurrency bugs in their code (they claim the newer Java is buggy). However TWS generally does work with the latest jdk, but they won't support it.
IB's telephone support is sometimes rude, the opposite of "hand holding". I guess they have only a few over-worked support people to keep costs down. Also, they only provide on-line statements and never send physical mail except for annual 1099 tax forms. So, be sure your spouse/executor knows you have an IB account, because if you die there will be no monthly statements to clue them!
In summary, IB is good, despite their warts. If you trade a few times a month or more, it's worth the hassles.
I don't know *any* techies who are interested in the 'world of finance'. In fact, as a group, they tend to hate it with a passion exceeded only by that of artists. But I hear there are a hell of a lot of *financiers* with an interest in the world of *tech*. The confusion is understandable. Update worldview accordingly.
... however, given the state of the markets right now, wouldn't it just be easier to pick up the phone, call your broker, and have him dump the stock you're looking to bail on?
All my savings since January has been in CDs and/or savings accounts, riding this out. But then, I'm only 24 and I don't have much anyway.
Any trading platform is only as good as the data it gets.
Not to sound like an ass but anyone who is that serious about trading needs to invest in a Bloomberg terminal. If you are just dinking around - that's one thing. But the summary seems to indicate you are looking for a "serious" trading platform. Don't waste your time with FOSS. FOSS has it's place but a trading platform is not it. Go with a proven solution.
There are plenty of "active trader" platforms out there from a variety of brokers. Most that I have see are Java apps. I run Schwab's web-based active trading on Linux all the time but even it is a simplified version of the real thing.
Also, one more thing to consider: I would hate to find out that my FOSS trading platform had a bug. If it's bad enough, it could be devastating and totally wipe you out. Do you really want to take on that kind of risk? This really isn't the place to be "testing" your trading platform when real dollars are at stake.
Now....analysis is a different beast. FOSS might have a place there. I don't know but I see no reason to reinvent the wheel when there are FAR better solutions already out there. I have yet to see anything from FOSS that is compelling. And no -- MS Money/Quicken imitators are NOT what we are talking about here. Not even close.
Yes you're the only one. The rest of us don't mistake open source to mean some anti-capitalist campaign but rather a way to make and distribute good software.
I use TD Ameritrade's API (and really nice Java based real-time market tool) which has everything I need for gathering data. Beyond running some perl scripts on the data to generate some basic statistical plots for gnuplot I don't use many other tools. I found that most success in the markets isn't how well you read the past but rather how well you understand the present and can forecast reasonable risk/reward actions.
I know I don't actually mention any FOSS solutions but as a mostly FOSS user this is how I trade.
Being most of this stuff needs a network connection anyways I am sure you will find particular websites that will do the trick. Why do you want to find and download an app, run an update every time the regulations change. Most of the apps for this stuff are so old and usually try to get people to use the web anyways. Don't look for an app when the Web can do the work just as well if not better.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I personally know a hedge fund manager who does fixed-income arbitrage. They manage billions of dollars and thrive on volatility. Their trading platform is windows-based, however, and to keep such critical systems running smoothly, they have to pay a lot of people to monitor it constantly. The reason more high-end firms don't use FOSS is due to the fact that all the top trading software out there is proprietary, custom, and Windows-based. Here's a profitable area that enjoys both economies of scale/scope and high barriers to entry. The first people to get in this market stand to make a lot of money.
That is the trading system I've spent several years working on is built entirely using Open Source tools and libraries. The system itself is not currently open, but that is a possibility we here certainly look favorably at.
As far as actual entire free trading systems, there is JavaTraders@googlegroups.com which is a good place to start. Also check out the quickfixj.org site, you will find some things there. There is also an Eclipse plugin which provides some level of GUI.
Frankly we didn't any of the code in any of those projects (although we do use ta-lib). But as I say, you can do a lot with ActiveMQ, any good open source RDBMS (PostgreSQL,MySQL) and your Enterprise Java framework bits of choice.
Basically if I were you I'd pick one of the java based projects that is kicking and does roughly what you want, the way you want to do it. For simple basic trading of one or two instrument classes you can probably put together something pretty workable.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
Thomson Reuters has a version of the BridgeFeed Toolkit (acquired by Thomson via Bridge, and then Reuters) in both C++ and Java APIs that works on Linux. The feed provides live quotes, historical data, and wire news, as well as cross-references and ticker lookup. It's not F/OSS, but it runs there. The product is very expensive.
The Bloomberg system incorporates the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla. That's only barely topical but I thought I'd mention it anyway. Bloomberg is also extremely expensive.
Say what you want about the origins of the problem but there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.
/. crowd. Say you have a $10 watch. You go to a pawn shop for a loan and they loan you what? I'd say about $5 or so. Certainly something less than the value of the watch, right? Well, on Wall Street lately, they've been getting $300 loans based on that $10 watch.
That, most definitely, happened on Bush's watch. The "laissez-faire" philosophy of the republicans sounds and looks a lot like Hoover right now. They have, literally, let Wall Street run itself. And you can see the end result on the front pages everyday. Whats the saying? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Look, I am no regulation lover but even the staunchest of conservative economists recognize free markets must have some regulation to insure a fair playing field. Under this administration -- there has been NONE.
Do you realize that many firms were allowed to leverage up 30 to 1? Let me break down what that means for the
That is totally fucked up and should have never happened. End of story.
http://jgnash.sourceforge.net/
get the jar file and run java -jar jgnash.jar (use the file name)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Specific places do offer terminals at very low prices. As to whether or not they would like it if you were running your own software instead of using their terminal, eh... Probably not.
Here's the problem. It takes a significant amount of net capital, not to mention you have to be a brokerage and a FINRA member, etc.
The market for "do-it-yourselfers" has to be incredibly small. Add in the fact they will be potentially high liability customers (heaven knows what sort of trading these people will do, but experience says they will mostly loose money big time). It doesn't really look like a very sustainable business model, nor even profitable enough for an existing firm to want to go after that market.
Technologically it is easy. I have a system that can easily do it, take in orders over FIX, sanitize them, do risk analysis, and route them either via a clearing firm system or DMA with a giveup in theory.
We have considered that the most likely possibility would be to form a coop and essentially just pool resources of small brokers and possibly individuals to provide the capital requirements and supply everyone with basic services like compliance reporting. Then it might be feasible, but don't hold your breath.
FINRA is TOTALLY corrupt. They're entirely controlled by a few big firms (and just that many fewer and bigger as of the last couple weeks). They're main function right now is to crush anything else. At best it is a real uphill battle.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
If you're going the Interactive Brokers approach, JBookTrader and JSystemTrader are both worth a look: http://code.google.com/p/jbooktrader/ and http://groups.google.com/group/jsystemtrader
I don't know if this is what you're looking for.
Think or swim was awarded "best software-based broker by Barrons" and hasd desktop, net and mobile clients.
But I am looking for a automated trading API for charlesschwab. But if I had to liquidate my holdings and move to another brokerage, I'd do it. I'd prefer an interface in python, php or even (gasp) perl.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
There appears to be absolutely no mention of WINE.
I'm sure you've tried it, but just sayin'.
If there is no support, perhaps go do some hacking around yourself? Or use all of those earnings and put a bounty on a Win program to be ported?
We have an actively maintained link farm responsive with a full set of FOSS trading and analytic tools at: link farm
It is maintained as part of our 'trading-shim' project (GPLv3) which connects to markets and history data farms via the Interactive Brokers TWS socket interface (which has been mentioned by others in this thread). It is a ground up new implementation, socket interface, written in C++, with a MySQL backing store. It compiles and runs on any POSIX capable platform -- Linux, Unix, OS/X; once Cygwin 1.7 releases from beta, we will pick up Windows as well.
It has been functional for the last couple years (ticker stream and ad hoc price history retrieval; full trading capabilities; symbol lookup; account details; and so forth) -- FOSS designed for commercial application; commercial and community support models.
trading shim
Really, it's just you. Me, I like my trading software open source so I can see what the hell is going on inside, and I release my own work from time to time (it's far too rough to link to on /., but there are copies drifting aorund) so people have a platform to work from.
I have not seen any open source projects that you can use as a platform for building a trading system.
I have built an intraday (within one day) trading system in Java. I'm afraid that this system is not open source either. This system runs one or more models that look for intraday trading signals. The Java software submits buy and sell orders. It is multi-threaded and runs one thread per stock. I have been very happy with the software performance. A long running "server" like this seems to benefit from Sun's HotSpot compiler. The system is web services based (e.g., it runs on Tomcat).
I used Interactive Brokers for my market data and order infrastructure. I was concerned about the quality of the Interactive Brokers tick data (the trade by trade data). Interactive Brokers consolidates their tick data feed so you get a consolidated tick about ever 250 msec. For my system this has been adequate. If you want to run on Linux or use Java there are few inexpensive options for real time data feeds. Information may way to be free, but market data is expensive.
I have some web pages on the alternatives that I explored as platforms for a Java/Linux based trading system. These notes can be found on my web page Software for Constructing a Market Trading System
I'm a "buy and hold on fundamentals" kind of investor, so kymoney2 works great for me. The project could use some work in the reporting section, but it keeps track of our small portfolio just fine.
http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net/index-home.html
Getting more complicated than that is generally out of range for the average individual investor. Sourceforge lists a bunch. Maybe you can find what you are looking for there? http://sourceforge.net/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=finance
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I'm pretty much got sucked in the same way. My solution was to write all of my own analysis tools. I've thought many times about open sourcing the goods. I've got 10 years of development into a data warehouse analysis system that pushes the limits of what PostgreSQL will do on modern hardware. The only way to ensure privacy of your analysis and back testing is to run your own data warehouse. I can only imagine the kinds of customer data that is skimmed from stock analysis/filtering "services". In my opinion, it's only worth doing if you can get a view of the whole market. Feeds of just a few stocks is incomplete when you're trying to marry trends of market to sector to individual stock. Finding a good data source can be quite a challenge if you don't have thousands a month to spend. But, it can be done with some compromises. Since I started developing analysis tools, probably the best alternative I've found out there is called quantlib and is C++ centric. If you know of a portfolio manager looking for a risk analysis computer geek then let me know. ;D
Or if anyone is serious about getting more serious about financial FOSS and/or SaaS, let me know.
i work on a quantitative trading desk at one of the big investment banks and i get quite a unique opportunity to straddle both the tech world and the finance world. most trading and risk mgmt systems are built using Java or C++ in linux environments...
in my world I rely heavily on perl and python. R or Matlab are good tools for doing regressions. R is FOSS. Matlab is not so we end up paying for a few licenses. In return you get good customer service, regular updates and a nice set of toolboxes for doing things like GARCH, etc..
Now you gotta ask yourself what sort of trading are you going to be doing? Are you looking at day-trading? This entails looking at market order books - bid/ask quotes and trades and working with large datasets. At this pt you may want to start thinking about optimizing your calculations and managing memory. A full days worth of quotes in today's market can be up to 60GB uncompressed (obviously this depends heavily on the formatting, etc... - but thats sorta what you have to deal with). You're better off writing optimized routines in something fast like C++. Pushing that much data through R or Matlab will grind those tools down to a halt.
Getting your hands on "tick" data is not too cheap if you're an individual. You can look up TAQ data on the NYSE website. They charge about $1000/month for access to their tick data.
If you're looking at investing (rather than just trading) on a longer time-horizon. Then you're going to need fundamental data. There are plenty of companies that charge hedge funds, etc millions of dollars a year for this type of data - companies like Bloomberg, Factset, Barra, etc... The thing is most fundamental data is freely available in regularly filed reports with the SEC - like 10Ks and !0Qs. What you are paying for is getting this data in 1 place and ensuring its quality which is crucial.
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
I never reply to AC's but I am making an exception.
The executive branch appoints people to run institutions like the SEC, FCC, etc. Those people appointed have totally abdicated their responsibility to the people. The entire purpose of the SEC is to make it a "level playing field" with respect to financial disclosure and equity trading. It is not.
Why? Because nobody in those posts is enforcing ANYTHING. And they haven't for a very long time. Yes, Congress makes the rules. But if nobody enforces them, are they really rules?
Yeah, this will be an endless worthless flame war, but I'm sorry you are living in some kind of fantasy land man. The whole Republican Party is rotted to the core. Sure, once maybe it stood for something, now it is just the tool of those who are utterly unprincipled and for whom nothing is unthinkable. No lie is too base, no act unconscionable.
No politician in 21st century Amerika dares to cross the line of the Corpocrats who effectively run everything. Look where the money flows my friend, the 100 richest families in the US gained $670 BILLION DOLLARS in network in the last 7 years. If you cross them, they just edit you out of the news cycle friend. There's no end to the dirty money and no way you'll stay in office.
The real estate bubble was caused by the fact that Wall St in its infinite greed simply kept ratcheting up the leverage and lowering its lending standards until the lid popped off the whole house of cards (good mixed metaphore, eh). Where were all the regulators? Oh, I forgot, a 'free market' means we don't actually pay attention to those pesky LAWS anymore! Just buy them lunch and hire them for some cushy jobs when they retire and its no problem.
Doesn't help that your precious Republicans happily dismantled as much of that oversight as they possibly could. NOW the Corpocrats are using the Republicans to spend MY money to bail out their carelessly run (or looted) companies? Forget it. NEVER VOTE REPUBLICAN AGAIN AS LONG AS YOU LIVE. If John McAncient had 1/10th of the integrity he pretends to he wouldn't even be able to stomach calling himself one.
But don't worry, they won't have to pay, because they've already probably just ignored the last possible chance they had to even possibly avert an environmental catastrophe so vast that in a few years eating will be a luxury and nobody will even know what the word 'vote' means.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
... that the 2 FMs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or whatever they are called) contributed a lot to Obama's campaign.
Here it is.
Save your money. The market is being heavily manipulated right now, and I seriously couldn't advise entering at this point.
How do you think they were ABLE to do those stupid things? Because the normal regulations were absent! And why were they absent? They were changed... in Washington!
Really, you just made the other guy's point for him.
So, where do you think the money went? (Hint: once printed, money does not just disappear!)
The corporations might not have the money in their coffers, but somebody does. THOSE are the people we should be looking at.
http://slashdot.org/~willyhill/journal/205317
I don't know if this is exactly what you wanted, but there's a financial analysis package called QuantLib. I'm not in the field myself, but we used it at my last stint as contractor. Unfortunately, it was a mortgage company, so the contract ended earlier than we'd originally planned. The license is the modified BSD one, so you can download and enjoy. Assuming, of course, that you understand quantitative finance, which I've discovered I don't.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
All of the stock market, without exception, falls under two categories: (1) dependent on inherently illogical factors, or (2) crooked. In fact it has to be one or the other, or else it would be predictable. And if it were that predictable, it would last maybe a week before it collapsed.
In general, techies don't like either of (1) or (2). Nothing more needs to be explained.
If some techie ever did come up with a reliable way to predict the market, it would go away very soon thereafter. It would be a total disaster for lots of people.
In order for it to be socialism, we have to actually get something out of it. This is just the government taking control of something else. We may see an immediate short-term benefit (which is all anyone ever cares about, or we wouldn't have this problem in the first place) but it'll fuck us over long-term.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Wake up and smell the fascism ??? How about, wake up and smell the socialism?
Uh, how about, "Wake up and smell the Crony Capitalism"?
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
... how much market data THEY get by analyzing your requests for data?
What a racket.
There is not much barrier to entry for FOSS. The product is put out there and people can try it out. If they like it, they use it.
Keep in mind that FOSS does not "compete" with proprietary products, in the conventional sense of the term. If it did, then there would be a high barrier. But it doesn't work that way.
If there were a high barrier for FOSS, then Microsoft would not be in the (slowly but surely) losing position it has found itself in. Do not misunderstand me: I am not predicting the demise of Microsoft. Far from it. But they have lost their stranglehold on the market.
It could be that we are agreeing. If you meant that it is a high barrier to conventional proprietary products but not for FOSS, then we are on the same channel.
All the little stockholders at AIG are getting the shaft.
Uh, I think that was a foregone conclusion when they hired inept management.
It was essential that every stockholder in AIG lose virtually everything they invested. Otherwise it becomes profitable to mismanage your company and let Uncle Sam buy you out.
I think that some of these resuces were necessary for the good of the greater economy. Sure, they shouldn't be necessary, but regulators messed up and now for the sake of not collapsing into a depression we need to clean up.
If I were in charge the only thing I'd do differently when doing bailouts like these would be:
1. Company is 100% taken over.
2. Stock is declared void. Stockholders get a 1-time eminent domain payment of (value of company assets)-(cost to taxpayers for bailout)/(# shares outstanding). Frankly the stockholders should be happy they don't end up owing money which is what the math certainly will work out to.
3. Corporate officers arrested and face heavy criminal penalties. Costing the taxpayers billions of dollars needs to be made a serious crime. It is certainly worse than robbing the corner store.
4. Government runs company in such a way to preserve the general economy.
5. Eventually company is either dissolved or IPO'ed - with all proceeds going to taxpayers.
If this were how bailouts worked you wouldn't see too many executives asking for them.
Don't get me wrong - the preference is in general to let companies just go bankrupt and not interfere. But, if interference is needed for the greater good than this is how it should be done.
check out this article on grism: http://www.linux.com/feature/146313 its written in ruby. been meaning to check it out for a while.
Interesting speech from Senator Dorgan when the bill, Financial Services Modernization Act, was being discussed '99. Those who don't know history...
"I remember a couple of circumstances that existed more recently. I was not around during the bank failures of the 1930s. I was not around for the debate that persuaded a Congress to enact Glass-Steagall and a range of other protections. But I was here when, in the early 1980s, it was decided that we should expand the opportunities for savings and loans to do certain things. And they began to broker deposits and they took off. They would take a sleepy little savings and loan in some town, and they would take off like a Roman candle. Pretty soon they would have a multibillion-dollar organization, and they would decide they would use that organization to park junk bonds in. We had a savings and loan out in California that had over 50 percent of its assets in risky junk bonds.
Let me describe the ultimate perversion, the hood ornament on stupidity. The U.S. Government owned nonperforming junk bonds in the Taj Mahal Casino. Let me say that again. The U.S. Government ended up owning nonperforming junk bonds in the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. How did that happen? The savings and loans were able to buy junk bonds. The savings and loans went belly up. The junk bonds were not performing. And the U.S. Government ended up with those junk bonds.
Was that a perversion? Of course it was. But it is an example of what has happened when we decide, under a term called modernization, to forget the lessons of the past, to forget there are certain things that are inherently risky, and they ought not be fused or merged with the enterprise of banking that requires the perception and, of course, the reality--but especially the perception--of safety and soundness.
Last year, we had a failure of a firm called LTCM, Long-Term Capital Management. It was an organization run by some of the smartest people in the world, I guess, in the area of finance. They had Nobel laureates helping run this place. They had some of the smartest people on Wall Street. They put together a lot of money. They had this hedge fund, unregulated hedge fund. They had invested more than $1 trillion in derivatives in this fund--more than $1 trillion in derivatives value.
Then, with all of the smartest folks around, and all this money, and an enormous amount of leverage, when it looked as if this firm was going to go belly up, just flat out broke, guess what happened. On a Sunday, Mr. Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board decided to convene a meeting of corresponding banks and others who had an interest in this, saying: You have to save Long-Term Capital Management. You have to save this hedge firm. If you don't, there will be catastrophic results in the economy. The hit will be too big.
You have this unregulated risky activity out there in the economy, and you have one firm that has $1 trillion in derivative values and enormous risk, and, with all their brains, it doesn't work. They are going to go belly up. Who bears the burden of that? The Federal Government, the Federal Reserve Board.
We have the GAO doing an investigation to find out the circumstances of all that. I am very interested in this no-fault capitalism that exists with respect to Long-Term Capital Management. Who decides what kind of capitalism is no-fault capitalism? And when and how and is there a conflict of interest here?
The reason I raise this point is, this will be replicated again and again and again, as long as we bring bills to the floor that talk about financial services modernization and refuse to deal with the issue of thoughtful and sensible regulation of things such as hedge funds and derivatives and as long as we bring bills to the floor that say we can connect and couple, we can actually hitch up, inherently risky enterprises with the core banking issues in this country.
I hear about fire walls and affiliates, all these issues. I probably know less about them than some others;
it wasn't all Bush. But it is still all recent...
Leverage (aka: debt) is key to our economic model. However, that leverage is carefully managed.
Management of the leverage is what is missing here. NO FIRM should be allowed to leverage up 30:1. (30x your collateral)
You are comparing apples and oranges.
And since you went there with LTCM....allow me to quote you a figure, "At the beginning of 1998, the firm had equity of $4.72 billion and had borrowed over $124.5 billion with assets of around $129 billion. It had off-balance sheet derivative positions with a notional value of approximately $1.25 trillion"
Management of leverage was obviously missing there. 1.25 trillion? That is absolutely totally fucking insane. But because Merriweather was a "smart guy" --- the investment banks let him do this. And it put the entire system at risk.
That's not supposed to happen. Ever. Yet it did. Do we learn nothing from history?
While it's not open source you could give Personal Stock Streamer a try:
http://www.personalstockstreamer.com/
It's free to use for non-professionals if you use it with your TD AMERITRADE account. There's a VBscript and C++ API for creating your own indicators, reports and extensions.
The honest truth is that both Democrats and Republicans want to put every American into a home. Nobody thinks you can have a stable foundation for life without home ownership, long term, and both parties have and will continue to have policies that encourage and support home ownership. In the go-go days of the 1990s, I remember Fannie Mae announcing, with cheers from both the Democrats and Republicans alike, that they were going to radically expand their operations and put 20 million new people into homes, which they did and then some. Now, probably a few million, maybe 10% of them, are in arrears and are in danger of losing their houses, but overall, the vast majority of people are in homes that they would not have had before, thanks to these policies.
Even now, with all of the crap in the mortgage sector, I would be willing to bet that home ownership percentage still is at an all time high.
So yeah, there's a hell of a mess on Wall Street right now, but, all in all, this policy has -worked-.
As a Republican, I'm not one who believes in tax laws to steal from the rich, but, by the same token, if the rich make a stupid mistake and lose their fortunes lending money to the poor, then, hell, that's all fair and good. Failures of the businesses of the rich, the collapse of banks, with the poor people either in houses whose mortgages they get off for, is yet another way capitalism recycles itself. Most of the time, it is trickle down economics, but other times, it is just a torrent of stupidity from the rich just blowing loads of money to the middle class. I'll take it. I'm going to wind up buying one of these crashed real estate market houses before too long....
This is my sig.
Yea, ok. I understand what you are saying except for one thing: we have tried laissez-faire. And we got the great depression. It is not true to say that those firms "made it through that time". Countless firms were wiped out. As were countless Americans. Just like now. Back then, it took the private industry (JP Morgan) along with FDR's new deal and a large scale war to bring us out of it. ie: there was heavy govt involvement.
Regulation is a balance. We both acknowledge that. But the balance is so tipped right now that it borders on laissez-faire. With the ever increasing complexity of the financial world, that is clearly the wrong way to go. It didn't work in the 1890's, it didn't work in the 1910's, it didn't work in the late 1920's, and it isn't working right now. Once again, our govt has had to step in to stabilize things. That - by default - tells you laissez-faire doesn't work.
And I have evidence to back this up: read the front page of any financial newspaper right now. Worst markets we've ever seen since the Depression. Is that a coincidence? No. It's not. History is just repeating itself. We didn't regulate appropriately back then and we aren't regulating appropriately now.
We let these firms pretty much do whatever they wanted and now you are seeing the results. Only after this crisis, did our govt wake up. Except by then, it was already too late.
I would recommend that you try Genius Trader. It's in Perl, and it's a little rough around the edges, but I think it will get you going where you want to go.
After you have back tested your trading idea, you'll have to open a brokerage account with someone with a nice API, if you want to trade elecronically. But my guess is that you don't have enough money to do that. Commissions will likely kill you, and there's a whole host of risk related to the technology (oh, you didn't want to trade 100000 shares?). But Genius Trader can give you the trades, and then you can hand trade them (I would highly recommend this route).
The thing that I would truly recommend to you though is just dump all the money you can in the market right now. Even if it goes a little lower from here, by the time you retire, the money you put in today is going to be worth a lot.
... it would only mean that they are behind the times and don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. Which is the whole point.
.NET... again, because they have no choice.
ALL the cutting-edge stuff today is being done in FOSS. The big-corporate software companies have been struggling to keep up. Yes, even Microsoft. They have invested in FOSS (because they had no choice) and they are even adapting open-source languages into
The fact that they might laugh at me is one of the reasons that they are losing their underwear in the market right now. Too bad, but that's the way it goes. If you can't keep up, you get left behind.
Good luck. From your response, you might be one of those who needs it.
Technical analysis is bullshit. If you want proof just look at bear sterns (I remember watching it drop from $30 to $10 in under 7 mins on scottrade), lehman bro. etc. Unless you're on the inside of the next scam (fundamentals all the way), your playing the lotto. Even on the smaller time scales, unless you have a damn fast and dedicated connection which would be for institutionals, you're not going to catch the arbitrage opportunities that come with trading the news - nobody is stupid enough to buy united airlines stock at $30 when they declare bankruptcy. You might think that you could get those last few orders that still appear on the level II screen, but the spread will go up and you'll bitch when your order isn't put through at the price you want because of back-filling orders. See http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=7484 for a description of how the FOREX scams work. The only "open-source" movement that might work at this point would be to create something like an OpenQuant clone or something like using interactive broker's api and mesh it with quantlib. But, all that would do though is speed up the release of new features into OpenQuant, which is a watered down version of the QuantDeveloper which is what the big boys use.
Not me.
I did state that the regulations were relaxed. They were. That is indisputable. For just one example, there used to be a federal regulation that limited the points that that a credit company could charge beyond the prime interest rate. Where is that regulation now?
I was not arguing about WHO did it... only stating that it was done.
I'm surprized that no-one mentioned Grism yet: http://www.grism.org/
or Merchant of Venice: http://mov.sourceforge.net/
or Money Bee: http://uk.moneybee.net/
or Ntropix: http://www.johncon.com/ntropix/
There doesn't seem to be a shortage of these things.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.
Yeah, like Sarbox for instance?
Do you realize that many firms were allowed to leverage up 30 to 1?
Oh, I think the fractional reserve lending went higher than 30:1, especially if you count the trading of credit default swaps in a ring. That's exactly what took down Bear Stearns - one of the banks one day just told them they wouldn't buy them anymore, and the bank's entire liquidity disappeared. Brilliant move to take out a competitor, IMHO.
But when you have an organization like Freddie or Fannie promising to back those mortgages with taxpayer money then who cares what the rules are? If the banks actually had to assume the risk themselves you can be sure they never would have taken on the subprime mortgages. I mean, a $600,000 no-money-down, interest-only, no-income-verification loan at 6%? Only the government could pick up that deal.
Face it - we're in this mess because government insisted on subprime mortgages, government flooded the market with cheap money, government has been spooking the markets with all of its inflationary spending, and, yes, the ratings agencies are completely worthless. Whichever one gave AIG a great rating last month deserves to go down like Arthur Anderson did for its Enron deals. So now the government is attempting to solve the problem with more inflationary spending. And came damn close to putting out more cheap money last week, or so the insiders say. I wonder who hit them with that cluebat.
That is totally fucked up and should have never happened. End of story.
Amen to that, brotha. But who's gonna stop them?
Quite frankly I couldn't care less if they destroy the Dollar - except I'm forced to use it. It's not like I'm ever going to see any of the future entitlements I'm supposedly paying into. If competition in currencies wasn't illegal I'd just ignore the whole thing and put my money in a responsibly managed currency. Any efforts to create such a currency currently result in men with guns raiding your operation and stealing all of your assets. This ensures that politicians can continue to pay their banker friends and contributors with the future labor of the citizenry. One three line bill could solve many of our current problems. How you think that's gonna work out?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Say what you want about the origins of the problem but there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.
Two things, it is demonstrably false that there was no securities regulation going on during all of this. The SEC has been doing plenty of things and the NASD (a self regulating body that handles securities regulation in addition to the SEC) in particular has been very busy wasting everyone's time collecting record fines (and wasting the money on really stupid things) for things that don't matter while ignoring those that do. That's the real problem in securities regulation.
But where you've really missed the mark and what many people don't realize is that mortgages aren't regulated as securities at the consumer level. So securities regulation was largely out of the picture here. Yes there is some regulation from RESPA etc, but in comparison to the regulation hurdles in order to do retail securities business, mortgages are nearly unregulated. There were huge numbers of unprofessional, untrained, and unethical mortgage brokers chucking mortgages with the maximum fees all too happy to not tell people it was only good for two years. And a large portion of this huge mess is from the subprime mortgages. I'm certainly not exempting the people that were all to happy to get themselves into houses they couldn't afford and didn't ask questions about their mortgage from blame though. It goes both ways.
Regulation only helps if it is smart regulation. From what I have seen in the industry, the regulators don't know anything about the finance industry or the products they are regulating. As long as that is going on, you can't have successful regulation.
Now, mortgages can be securitized when bundled, etc, but that part of the equation isn't where the failures have been. Despite other misinformed posts here, that part actually helps consumers and the markets to spread risk and price it appropriately.
... is Firefox and an index fund. Dollar-cost averaging is your friend.
1) The rich right the laws; they never pay. Why do you think capital gains is 15%. Why do you pay 25-38% on your income tax?
2) Banks are corner stones of the economy. We allow the banks to lend 10x what is on deposit. So for every dollar on hand, 10 get lent out. That's why they want you to buy CDs. If a bank fails and it had $85B on hand, then it takes $850B out of the economy. If enough banks fail, we have a credit crisis and deflation.
So that is why. Now if lending practices only requires 2:1 or 1:1 we'd be in a far better position in terms of stabilty, but we couldn't grow the economy on credit.
There is of course, the acounting change that could be made that says you can only count the payments that you have received. Currently, when you get a loan to buy a car, it is recorded as one sale-one transaction. But the real situation is you'll be making 1/50th of the total price in payments over 60 months. That would go along way in realistically measuring the finances better.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Robert,
I think your first inclination to use R was right. Specifically, consider Diethelm Wuertz's R package called RMetrics, available through either http://cran.r-project.org/package=Rmetrics or http://www.rmetrics.org.
R has pedigree tracing back several decades at
Bell Labs, and though its million-plus users are concentrated within academia, it is gaining currency within several high-profile
quantitative analysis groups, including Barclays Global Investors. It's extensibility
via user-contributed packages has spawned an active developer community.
"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things." -R.P.Feynma
1) The rich right the laws; they never pay. Why do you think capital gains is 15%. Why do you pay 25-38% on your income tax?
Hmmmm... let's see, for me, once I put on the mortgage interest, the allowances for my wife and son, I think my real federal rate is probably much lower, as it is for most people. If there is a regressive part of the federal tax, it would be in social security tax caps, but even then, the disbursements are also capped...
This is my sig.
The 79.9% stake is due to accounting rules requiring the government to put losses on its own books. Look it up, because I don't fully understand why.
I did not mean that if a techie came up with a method to predict the stock market, that the method would go away. I am confident that someone that intelligent would find a way to make it pay off before others got wind of what was going on.
I meant that if the stock market proved to be reliably predictable -- by anybody -- it would almost instantly cease to be a viable means of doing business. The "predictor" would make a killing fast, then get the hell out.
what FOSS software do you use for financial analysis, trading, system development, and testing in a Un*x environment?
I am aware of TA-Lib, QuantLib and libraries implementing the FIX protocol to be used in commercial products and private Un*x trading applications.
Sadly, most people looking for a solid FOSS trading platform will find that they need to roll up their sleeve to get something decent working.
I have found that software in this area seems quite sparse.
Indeed. I closely monitor the FOSS community since 1998 for a trading platform. What I observed was a lot of well intended projects, but even to these days, none did reach satisfying maturity.
I think it relates to under estimation of the complexity. Most project starts with a lot of energy then goes idle because of unattainable short-term goals.
A general purpose platform will not emerge until someone put coherently together existing building blocks instead of starting yet another weak trading platform from scratch.
Example of building block is the FIX protocol. Many FIX libraries have matured. Quantlib is another solid example.
My contribution to the whole picture is TA-Lib. It is a set of functions for people who care about technical analysis (shameless plug).
\Mario
I would only change one thing in your plan. (it may not really be a change depending on interpretation) I would have the proceeds go to paying down the national debt. I'm all for less taxes and credits to taxpayers, but I can't in good conscience watch the government continue to mortgage the future to finance the present. Some fat needs to be cut and some loans need to be paid off.
Not all life is cyber. Extra Income
Yep, GP was off his rocker. The defense budget could buy 1 in 30 family-of-fives a new house every year, though.
XML causes global warming.
My favorite investment site stockchase runs on Gnu/Linux, uses Mysql, and apache. I use it to see what stocks are worth while, and which to stay away from. Then I do my purchase using firefox.
...is that when a company goes bankrupt, holders of common get squat. Preferably, you learn this before you invest. Even more preferably, you learn not to invest in a company that's going bankrupt (toughest lesson to learn). The 2nd best lesson is learning when to take a loss. I lost $1000 on Worldcom. It was the best $1000 I ever lost, when you consider what would have happened if I had "held on, because I just knoooow it's coming back".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you are going to trade no more often than daily, Yahoo provides price and volume history for stocks and some indexes. You can write your own programs in the language of your choice to analyse this data and test trading strategies. You'll have to look elsewhere for other historical data like earnings and sales.
Be aware that with the popularity of computerized analysis things have changed. Simple momentum systems that could have gained 1 million times from 1971 to 2002 have been money losers since 2002.
Also, all databases have some errors. When test results seem too good to be true, they probably are, and database errors are one potential source of misleading results.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
As a software engineer, I too share some interest in financial analysis and have researched it off and on over the years with an eye towards developing some of my own analysis tools as a hobby interest. However, I have continually been discouraged by the lack of decent public market data services of the type that would be suitable for feeding to analysis software. The decent market data services all want thousands of dollars per month for their streams so that basically precludes anyone but the trading professionals working for financial services companies or high net worth individuals (HNWI), who have enough at stake to justify the $20,000 per month Bloomberg Terminal, from doing anything more than dabbling. The free services are delayed 20 minutes or more and/or have limits on queries per unit time (usually both and always the query limit) etc that make them unsuited for automated analysis (probably what the companies want, since they are trying to sell you up to their professional streaming services). I stopped after some basic analysis and test programs because I knew that without access to relatively comprehensive streaming data services, much of the value of a more complex automated analysis system would be unrealized. The professional industry is already well served by Bloomberg, Reuters, and other terminal / market data businesses so it really isn't worth trying to compete against them professionally by starting a company (the existing services have a massive head start and are already firmly entrenched and unlikely to be unseated and the company would need millions to get off the ground in any case since exchanges are not going to give a new firm any breaks on prices they charge Bloomberg and other firms for access to the live streams). In the end I learned enough about finance to do my own research and analysis manually with the assistance of some basic tools that I cobbled together for myself and that is basically all there is to be done about it unless you want to get serious and plunk down the big bucks for access to the professional data services (you have $20,000 per month to burn?).
... all the decent brokerages use web access for trading.
I use an OpenOffice-based spreadsheet that manages my overall financial status, downloading end-of-day quotes, maintaining various financial aggregates and performing charting and record keeping.
All this is on a Mac, under OS X, but the same (or very similar) software should work under Linux.
If you want to run a Black-Sholes derivative analysis modeling program, you're in a different realm from me.
Otherwise, a simple web browser and spreadsheet should handle your needs.
You will, of course, need to know something about writing spreadsheet macros, and have a command of spreadsheet formulas that goes beyond simple =C2-B2 formulas. That sort of thing can be picked up pretty easily via some googling and a bit of effort on your part.
Just as easy to have a bug in commercial software as in FOSS.... Look at the Windows vs Linux OS debate.
There are some very bright FOSS programmers out there that code for fun - while some commercial hacks are forced to do it for rent. Who might have more pride in the code that is released?
You can't straightforwardly judge the value of the government's stake in AIG using the current price of the common stock. Yes, AIG's common stock's price is currently that, but that's after the government took an 80% stake in the company--a move which, all other things being equal (which they are not), makes each public share worth 20% of what it was worth before.
In addition, the government has senior preferred shares, which means that all of the common and preferred shareholders must be wiped out before the government takes a hit. This makes the government's shares more valuable than the common.
Are you adequate?
Stockcharts.com for technical analysis.
Spreadsheets (with custom macros) Open Office "Calc", or you can use Excel if you're not on Linux.
Yahoo.com for Fundamental analysis data.
Some stuff on Edgar, and other misc sites.
You actually need to use Technical analysis along with fundamentals.
Fundamentals only measure "the past" (last time a company produced earnings/losses and possibly massaged the numbers one way or the other - "we managed earnings"). You can anticipate how the Fundamental traders will react though.
Technical analysis does tend to do some predictions of current state and future states (indicates trader trends). But is not always very accurate. However, there are a lot of people who follow the Technical side so you can anticipate what they will do when the "signals" appear.
End result - you need to analyze both techniques and know when to use one tool or the other.
I don't think that GP meant to imply this is "good" for taxpayers; rather, that it was simply not as outrageously bad as had been suggested. GP was responding to GGP's assertion that AIG had gotten $85 billion with no strings attached. The point is that government's 80% senior preferred stake is a big string attached to the money. It means that the government must be paid before AIG's common and preferred shareholders, and that in a bankruptcy or liquidation, the common and preferred shareholders must be completely wiped out before the government can take a loss in its share.
In effect, there are three interested parties in this deal, and each one's stake must be wiped out before the next one takes a loss:
The deal is structured this way in order to rescue AIG's creditors without rescuing its shareholders (which you can still call "bad" if you like). This is "good" only in the sense that taxpayers' money doesn't go to help AIG's shareholders, who are still being made to bear the risk of being wiped out by their company's bad deals.
Are you adequate?
Please don't label me a troll, but isn't this the most irrelevant time in the history of Slashdot for this question?
Property is theft.
Well, if you have house (and not in danger of losing it), you're not in the poorest part of the economy. Lets no forget that all taxes are regressive. You can only eat so much food, drive so many places, and buy so many things that the differnce in lifestyle costs between $100k and 200k isn't as large as it is between $25k and $50k. You probably also have a 401 or some kind of deferral which further lowers your tax rate. The poor don't get 401ks.
Still, I would be surprised if you were lower than 15%. But the rich don't make their money at wages - that's just for petty cash. They make their money (and the vast majority) on investments, which is effortless, and taxed the least. The whole system favors the rich.
Fortunately, it only takes one thing to go from poor to rich - the ability to have deferred gratification. With that, you can put your money to working for you, and not you for your money.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
http://quantlib.org/index.shtml
You can use their limited charting package and place orders on *nix.
WTF? The turn down was caused by a whittling away at banking laws starting in the 80's under Reagan. Sorry, we can't blame him, he was a asleep. Wasn't there some savings and loan scandal that involve two guys named Bush. Neil and Jeb Bush, the moron's who is pretending to in charge brothers. Just because you're Republican does not allow you the right to blame other people for your parties mistakes, because you can not see beyond your nose, and do not anything about critical thinking.
Just Firefox. Used to access a website that runs on some proprietary stuff.
I would like to see cheap/free or AGPL licensed software like Sage - except, unlike Sage, actually would work properly.
Their support is the same as their Windows support - Not very good in other words.
I don't really get why you're asking.. But here is some big names, Microsoft, IBM, Novell, Sun, Cisco, Nokia, Sony, Apple...
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open_source_software
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's a complicated public/private structure, and basically anything less than a book-length explanation of it oversimplifies in one way or another. It's the de facto U.S. central bank, and the main federal agency regulating banking, but also has significant private components. Its funding sources are technically ownership and fees by various private banks, but restricted in such ways that it's de facto more like government regulation and bank taxes than ownership and fees between private entities. Its board of governors are appointed by the President, and confirmed by the Senate. It's also effectively an operational arm of the U.S. Treasury for everything from tax collection to paper-money supply to treasury-bond issuance and interest payments.
More to the point, its solvency is implicitly guaranteed by the U.S. government, much like that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were (and those two quasi-private entities were actually de facto considerably more private than the Fed is).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Fundamentally FOSS and financial trading software are incompatible concepts. IE if you develop any software product of tangible use and value then it does not make sense for the author to leave it as a free product - when you can be making money out of it (and generally substantial amounts).
This was the pattern we saw. Many developers had started projects with good intentions, and as training exercises for themselves etc. but then after that they usually branched off to create a commercial product, or were hired by a financial institution which usually includes confidentiality in the contract.
Projects like EclipseTrader are a progression, but are quite a way behind the edge in terms of functionality - they are recreating tools which were commercial products some ten years ago - which is not to say it is not a useful tool, which it is.
It is the same reason that market data (share prices etc) is generally quite expensive in real time, but often free after 15 minutes. It is a bit like knowing who is the winner of a horse race - 5 minutes makes a big difference to the value of the information! For academic purposes, exchanges like Euronext (LIFFE) will provide tic level data all the way back if you ask nicely.
If you invented a trading system which could be shown to help generate a good income & profits - would you give it away for free?
- if you do please send me a copy!
Ben
2. Stock is declared void. Stockholders get a 1-time eminent domain payment of (value of company assets)-(cost to taxpayers for bailout)/(# shares outstanding). Frankly the stockholders should be happy they don't end up owing money which is what the math certainly will work out to.
Under UK law eminent domain purchases have to be at market value. Since the shares in a failed company are worthless, isn't the market value zero? In other words, I think shareholders should get nothing because if a bank needs a state to bail it out, its shares are worthless.
Incidentally, I believe your scheme is how it works in Scandinavia now. I vaguely remember something in the Economist about it...
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
If all you did was insure the mortgages, that would be the same as a bailout. Now suddenly those risky loans have zero risk, because you essentially just turned them into T-bills.
Don't get me wrong - I understand the need for relief for the consumers who hold these loans (within reason - they were idiots as well but you can aruge they were misled). What kind of people get conned by con artists? Often, they are greedy people (or sometimes vulnerable people). The senile elderly man who has no family who was misled about loan terms for his modest home is one thing, but the middle-aged couple who wanted to own a McMansion is another.
In any case, consumers are served by the bailouts. Now the government holds their loans, and can adjust the payment terms in a manner that is in the public interest. Essentially it is the consumers that are being bailed out, but indirectly while keeping the structure of these huge corporations intact. Taxpayers are going to pay out big money no matter what - that was a foregone conclusion when we got into this mess. The important thing isn't to save taxpayer money, but to minimize the losses to the average American, while punishing those responsible in such a way as to prevent a repeat of the problems and adjusting regulations where appropriate.
Again, don't get me wrong. I dislike socialism - but not as much as I dislike fascism which is what we're fixing here. The guys who ran these companies (and the complicit regulators) need to be on the hook for the consequences of their mismanagement. Putting a bunch of stock and insurance analysts out of work doesn't really help accomplish this. The economy needs reputable insurance companies - so rather than destroy an otherwise functioning corporation, why not just fix it - it will save taxpayers money in the long run.
Yes and no. Those companies still have assets - just not very liquid ones. I don't want this to be a simple matter of assets-liabilities - because it needs to take into account the huge liability Uncle Sam is taking on after the buyout to clean things up. Basically, the liabilities on these companies are understated because they're being managed in such a way as to make the stockholders the most money and not in such a way as to prevent a depression.
Now, in general companies aren't charities and shouldn't be run as charities. However, I don't think it is too much to put some kind of limit on greed. When private citizens can cause this kind of economic damange, either one of two things happen:
1. We regulate to prevent this kind of damange from happening in the future.
2. We allow companies to hold this power, but punish those who misuse it.
I think the solution is some combination of 1 and 2. We do need to reign some things in, but we don't want a command economy so at some point you need to give CEOs a bit of a leash - with an understanding that if they leave a mess on the neighbors lawn they'll have to clean it up and spend 15 years in the doghouse.
Ummm, this looks like a windows app. The poster is looking for linux ones.
Does that mean US Taxpayers Ski for free? http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080918/NEWS/80918001/1001
You may want to consider marketcetera. I haven't used it myself. But if you are trading professionally, you may want to consider it with an Interactive Brokers FIX account. My bet is that it won't run out of the box, and would need a lot of configuration and testing with whoever you maintain a FIX connection with. http://www.marketcetera.com/
AFAIK, there is no end-to-end foss solution that will perform like a trader GUI.
Well actually, the stock market has become quite attractivly priced lately.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Forget EMS and even OMS, but quickfix is definitely a must-have.
QuantLib is the other.
Maury
If you're into Trading the Forex Market, there's Oanda. Their FXTrade and FXGame platform work amazingly well on Linux :)
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
what FOSS software do you use for financial analysis, trading, system development, and testing in a Un*x environment?
Finding halfway decent FOSS trading packages that run under Linux is tricky enough. you'll then still need to get your data feeds from somewhere and these can cost a fair amount of the beer tokens.
In the past I had used Swing Tracker which provides a clean Java interface for technical analysis. The support was good too. It's a free package but you have to subscribe to the data feeds. At least they're realtime.
More recently I've been looking at the forex markets. Once again, finding decent technical analysis software turned out to be slim pickings, but ACM provide a very good Java application called Advanced Trader. The package is free and you can use it on a demo account to get the feel using live prices. It's a very comprehensive piece of software that includes many (but not all) functionality a forex trader might need.
Are there programs you would like to see written or ported?
I've heard some good things about eSignal and even tried to run it under Wine. Would be happy to try it again if they did a native Linux version...but not in QT. ;)
what commercial entities do you know of that are using FOSS software in their operation?
I would suggest that just about every single one does somewhere in their operations.>/p>
Regs.
Iain.
If you think the purpose behind writing programs is to make money, then of course FOSS is foolishness, whatever the market.
However, there are other purposes to writing software, just as there are other purposes to a lot of activities. Take flower gardening for example. Some people spend hours and hours in their yards, pulling weeds, planting bulbs, pruning bushes, etc. Why? They don't earn money from it. They can't eat the flowers. There's no profit in it, and significant costs. So why do it? For the pleasure it brings. For the satisfaction in a job well done, the sense of accomplishment. Maybe to bring a little beauty into the world.
The same thing goes for writing FOSS software. It satisfies a need. It provides a sense of accomplishment. In certain circles, it can bring fame, and respect. Those things can mean more to a person than money.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Brokers usually supply the software that you may be looking for. My personal preference is Interactive they are the cheapest and have the widest selection of investment options, also their client operates on any OS and is available via the WEB: http://www.interactivebrokers.ca/en/general/education/highlights.php?p=s&ib_entity=ca As for charting and forecasting well, that depends on what kind of investor you are; some economist friends of mien use adobe frame maker with custom software to model economies (I'm talking nation based GDP estimates used to determine things like CPI). Depending on what and where you are looking you'll need to find good "Charting" software as for the methods you'll need to educate yourself with regards to the methods you wish to use and then implement those theories (including back-testing). Oh and NEVER EVER FORGET to BACK test your ideas, if it made you money in the past i may work in the future. As always IANAL, IANAFA, IANACGA, YMMV, TIRIAI (There's inherent risk in all investing).
Still, I would be surprised if you were lower than 15%. But the rich don't make their money at wages - that's just for petty cash. They make their money (and the vast majority) on investments, which is effortless, and taxed the least. The whole system favors the rich.
I would take exception to the idea that investment is effortless. If investment were effortless, then, the entire middle class that does invest would be billionaires. Remember, Warren Buffett began his investment career by buying and fixing a vending machine and putting it in the right place. He just doubled his money every year and half or so for the rest of his life. If investment is so easy, as you say, why can't you do it? Why can't everyone?
Good investment requires a lot of research, and that takes work.
This is my sig.
The guys who ran these companies (and the complicit regulators) need to be on the hook for the consequences of their mismanagement.
I'm not holding my breath.
Job Description: Help develop real-time, network driven systems, using python/cython/c.
You will be working with a small team of programmers, network engineers
and traders, to develop a lightning fast trading platform.
Experience in one or more of the following is desirable:
* real-time systems, real-time memory management
* network programming, network protocols
* distributed computing
* gui programming, rpc
Experience in the following is helpful but not essential:
* financial protocols
* experience trading equities, futures or forex products
Zone Holdings is a proprietary trading firm located at the New York Mercantile Exchange.
E-mail contact: resumes@zonellc.com
Regulators messed up? What regulators? The problem with the AIG "bail out" is that it's not a bail out at all. It's just a 2 year bridge, so that it becomes someone else's problem. Bernanke, Paulson, and the rest of them won't be around then to care. In 2 years, when they definitely won't be able to pay back their loan (how many bankrupt companies can you name that could pay back an $85 bln loan @ 11.5% interest in 2 years??), We will give AIG another one. And then again 2 years after that. And so it goes... Financial collapse due to sheer greed and ineptitude should not be bailed out. What lesson is being learned here? Truly free markets are not sustainable, and NEVER have been. Greed always takes over, and leads to poor decison-making and, without fail, financial collapse, which in turn leads us back to more regulation and government oversight. Why not just keep the regulation the whole effing time? Greedy politicians who get big bucks from big business to get rid of all those pesky regulators. That's why. In our lifetimes, I doubt this cycle will change.
http://tradelink.googlecode.com/
is a .NET platform for daytrading futures + equities, open source. I don't think it's been tested on Mono, but it just uses basic Windows.Forms so it should work for the most part. We'd welcome any help from someone with more mono experience than me...
in terms of broker support, it works with IB... although it's only been tested with IB on windows. It also works with Assent... although assent is windows-only.
We have a small community of people who develop with it... also there are several firms and traders who use it every day... both for trading black/grey strategies and for some more mundane stuff like quote screens or risk management platforms. It comes with a bunch of applets but the library is multi-purpose and lets you build almost any trading "thingee" pretty quick.
hit me up on the developers mailing list if you want to help us get it running on mono...
Socialism != communism.
Now do you get what it means?
...are we scared yet?
Stock price is based on market value, just because the owner of the stock changes doesnt mean you can void it. A company has to purchase its stock back from shareholders to reduce the amount on the market (see treasury stock)
Sure - but I did in fact state that the stockholders would be paid for their shares - in accordance with the true company value (which is the assets-liabilities - including the liability owed to the government for fixing everything).
Of course stockholders should not owe money for purchasing stock beyond the initial investment.
When did I say otherwise. I said that stockholders should consider themselves fortunate that they don't owe money. I didn't say that they actually would. However, major stockholders might be liable if they in any way conspired in illegal activity - fraud is grounds for piercing the corporate veil.
Costing taxpayers billions of dollars is not a crime.
I never said it was. I said that it needs to be MADE a serious crime. That means changing the laws. Then, it is a crime.
Your method of a bailout would screw taxpayers, the new shareholders, into paying for the illegal jailing of corporate executives while costing original shareholders more than their investment (also illegal).
I never proposed the illegal jailing of executives, but rather changing the laws so that it is legal to jail them. Sure, maybe it is too late to jail the current execs, but you could at least tie them up in Federal lawsuits so they don't see the outside of a courthouse for 50 years. That would be a tiny expense compared to what those execs caused. And I never proposed costing shareholders more than their investment. I thought it was obvious that if the sum came out negative (a virtual certainty) that simply no dividend would be paid.
And, I don't agree that just because nobody prevented the execs from running the economy into the ground that they bear no responsibility whatsoever. When you run a country there are two basic philosphies. One is that you can pass a bazillion laws to keep people from taking advantage of each other. The other is that you can have laws that generally accomplish this, but which are broad enough to punish those who fail to use discretion. We need to get away from the "well, technically what I did wasn't illegal even though I know that for personal gain I cost half the country six months pay" excuses.
Alright -- indifference is not the same as hate. I'm not sure which is really operating, and I'm not sure how much it matters. As for the movie pi -- no this is not an example of techies being interested in finance. That's *filmmakers* being interested in both tech and finance. A techie being interested in finance would be some real person (not an actor) going on and on about 'solving' the stock market in between bouts of criticism over the direction of the LINUX kernel. I have never met this type of person. In my opinion, it barely exists. I think Jane Q. Public has it right -- techies mistrust finance because they tend not to believe it can actually be predicted (there are a lot of good arguments for this, not least among which is the human tendency to see patterns where there are none -- and here is where the movie PI is a great example, because pretty much all of the events in PI can be simply explained as a sick human brain running its pattern-matcher out of control). So techies tend to think that people who think they can game the market non-randomly are fooling themselves. Basically financial analysis as a *predictive* tool, is just junk science to a lot of very serious nerds. It's too much like social science. It isn't 'hard'. They don't like it. They suspect it's bullshit. And they *really* hate bullshit. I was wrong, above. I've discovered that I *can* explain it to you. 8)
"Every time the economy realizes that the share market is imaginary money, we have a crash. But then they forget it again."
This was proven many many times my economy scientists (or how you call them in the USA).
I don't believe in imaginary money. And neither should you. :)
Stock markets trading real goods are another thing.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
There are actually a number of options available. If you mean automated trading, the list of choices narrows, but there are still dozens of alternatives. If you include only open source automated trading systems (ATS), you'll be left with only a couple. I manage one of the FOSS ATS, JBookTrader (http://code.google.com/p/jbooktrader/). Feel free to join, we need more developers.
I'm entirely in favor of that. The only thing I'd add, at least in the current crisis, is confiscation of up to 80% of the endowments of major business schools.
Why not just keep the regulation the whole effing time?
A lot of people seem to think knowing the right level of regulation is easy. In fact, there are only two levels: too little and too much. And you don't know which you've got until years later.
The problem with excess regulation is that it's a quiet problem. Things cost more. People start fewer businesses. Business owners spend more time on paperwork. Competitors who are less regulated beat you like a drum. Overall, you get less economic growth.
That's not to excuse the free-market fundamentalists, the crony capitalists, or the ideologues. They aren't arguing against regulation because they're worried about the greater good. But finding the right level of regulation can be tricky.
The main? Not sure. One of the main? Definitely. Notice, how the banks like BofA and JPM are sitting pretty — and were even in a position to buy the failing investment banks (Bear Stearns went to JPMorgan earlier this year, Merill Lynch — to BofA last week). They have the same "toxic" securities. But they don't have to account for them in the same way — they are allowed to use certain financial models to come up with a price for the paper the are holding, rather than being forced to price it at today's market prices... In a normal (liquid) market there is little difference. In one spooked (even temporarily) by mortgage-related panic — it is a difference between life and death. Because if nobody wants that paper today (even though its issuer is solvent, and continues to pay dividends, etc.), then, under the "mark to market" requirements, the paper is worth zero and you have no collateral. You lose your credit ratings (automatically). And then, immediately, your counterparties are seizing whatever other collateral you may have put up to guarantee deals, and, whooops, your (ex-)employees are carrying out their stuff out of your (ex-)offices...
Perhaps, the main culprit were Freddie and Fannie. Created to address a "market inefficiency" — no sane banker would risk giving their own money to anyone, who managed (in this blessed country!) to stay too poor to have any money for a downpayment — they grew up into two disasters. Here is one, somewhat partisan, opinion. You may disagree with person, but some of the facts there (the main beneficiaries of their lobbying efforts, and their accounting irregularities ) are indisputable.
These are empty words — and a spin. Here they are restated, spun just as convincingly in the opposite direction: "In fact, the tearing down of the barriers between different financial activities allowed for greater efficiency and the benefits of the economy of scale, thus allowing better-tailored financial products to be offered to clients at lower fees."
And my spin above is closer to truth than yours. Because yours is similar to arguing against air-travel using air-crashes as an example. Yes, an air-plane can crash — in particular, if it touches the ground however slightly during flight. But it can bring passengers much further, much faster, and for much less, than any previously known method of transportation. This is little consolation, when you picking up bodies from the wreckage, but remains an objective truth.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Once you learn how to make money in the market, you have enough money to buy whatever best in breed software is out there to make more. FOSS gets lost in that shuffle, real quick.
Unless you know any coders who spend about 12 hours a day making money in financials, and another 12 hours a day coding up software to show you how they do it (not likely), just use whatever works to make you money.
The best money managers out there often use a pencil and paper and just use the computer screen as a way to get real-time data for their analysis. The rest is just a waste of valuable research time.
+++OK ATH