I was involved in a dot-com startup (low-profile - nowhere near as famous as Sportal, Boo or ClickMango) at that time and I have to say that it was a really exciting time. I certainly have no regrets. Sure, with hindsight, I'd have done some things differently but not massively so. We adapted and learnt pretty quickly and with the knowledge and experience we had, I think that the decisions we made weren't bad. I certainly learnt a hell of a lot during that phase of my career. Not many people have taken a business plan and a lump of seed capital, built a business out of it and then had to wind it up again.
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and as the business I helped start up didn't survive, the mudslingers can claim that we were a failure. However, our investors were happy that we had achieved what we had set out to do with the seed capital they had put up. I'll tell you this much - there were an awful lot of investors who were a lot less happy than ours.
It was kinda like a gold rush - some people sold out for a fortune or survived the crash and are still going; others went bust or decided to cut their losses before they went bust. Sure, there was hubris and some amazingly incompetent people were given stupid amounts of money to essentially burn but there were also a lot of guys who had good ideas who saw an opportunity to make them happen and, like all entrepreneurs, some were successful and others weren't.
Five years after the event, there's a lot of self-proclaimed experts who'll spout on about irrational exuberance and all the rest but very, very few of them were actually there at the time and even fewer actually took the plunge and got stuck in. Some might say that reflects well upon their judgement but like I said, I have no regrets and the holier-than-thou spouting of someone who's never walked the walk is only so much line noise.
Now, I'm no expert on trading systems... No, wait - I am an expert on trading systems!
I work on electronic trading systems for one of the big investment banks and I take care of the GUIs used by our fixed income traders for trading both cash and derivative instruments on all the exchanges mentioned here - Eurex, LIFFE, CME, CBoT - as well as many, many others.
I've been following this issue and I hope that TT's patents will be challenged and overturned. Here's why (note that you should read this and then read the twopatents.
Futures exchanges are generally order-drive - i.e. you submit an order to buy/sell a certain amount of a particular instrument at a certain price. There are hundreds of market participants, and they all want to do different things. For a given instrument - Al might want to buy 100 contracts at 100.00, Bob might want to sell 50 contracts at 100.01, Charles wants to buy 1200 contracts at 99.99, Dave also wants to at 99.99, but he only wants 77 contracts, and Egon wants to sell 492 contracts at 100.02.
Now, a typical way of showing this in a graphical manner is as follows:
NB: Apologies for the crap formatting. The extra spaces are Slash's fault - if you're confused, pipe it through 'tr -d` `' - or, if you're a lamer, cut'n'paste it into an editor and delete the spaces.
'Bid' means 'Buy' and 'Offer' means sell. 'BQ' and 'OQ' stand for 'Bid Quantity' and 'Offer Quantity' respectively. Note how Charles and Dave's orders are added together.
Now, the term for this sort of representation, is the "depth". If I'm a trader looking at this, I know that, if I want to (and assuming the depth doesn't change before I submit my order), I can sell 100 contracts at 100.00 and/or sell 1277 contracts at 99.99.
So, how obvious is it to represent the depth as a horizontal bar chart?
Now, let's say I decide to sell 50 contracts at 100.00 - i.e. I want to 'hit' that 'bid' (the opposite is to 'lift' someone's offer). Do I want to click on a 'Place Order' button, then select which instrument it is from a list, tick a 'Buy'/'Sell' radio button and type in the quantity and price before hitting select?
Do I hell! I want to click on the '100' and have a "Submit Order" pop-up appear straight away with the 'Instrument', 'Quantity' and 'Price' fields pre-filled, with a big fat 'Submit' button that I hit to send the order to the market.
The order goes in, the exchange's order matching system matches it against Al's order and executed the trade. I then get a pop-up that says "You've just sold 50 contracts at 100.00" and Al gets a pop-up saying "You've just bought 50 contracts at 100.00".
Now, let's say that by some amazing coincidence, I have 1377 contracts that I want to sell. I can get out my calculator and figure out that if I offload my position by hitting those two bids (I neither know nor care that the 1277 bid is actually two orders), I'll get an average price of approx. 99.99073.
Or, how about instead of having to pull out my calculator, my GUI calculates and displays this automatically, as follows:
Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.
Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.
Well, I'm not sure when you were at University, but...
Summer 1996 - Dropped out of university. Unemployed. No qualifications. On the dole.
September '96 - Start "working" at small ISP for £10 per day cash in hand (and free 'Net access, obviously), answering tech support lines and earning extra for stuff like web page design and doing sales/consultancy for companies who want to get online.
Late '97 - ISP gets taken over by a small telco. I become "Technical Sales Manager", then a project manager.
Mid '98 - Get worried that I'm becoming a clueless manager, so quit and get a job as a unix systems engineer with a digital asset management solutions provider.
Nov '99 - Get recruited into aforementioned dot-com.
Summer 2000 - Following the bursting of the dot-com bubble and corresponding drastic plunge in prospects of getting the first-round funding we'd have needed to turn the venture profitable, we wind up the company whilst still solvent, returning over half the seed investors' cash. Wary of the industry, I hold fire on various job offers from dot-coms and consultancies and instead take a 3-month contract, setting up e-commerce infrastructure at Deutsche Bank.
Spring '02 - "Three months" turned out to last 18 months and I finally depart DB after setting up a bunch of their Equities division's e-commerce systems (e.g. dbconvertibles.com, ederivatives.db.com, www.xavex.com).
Summer '02 - After a slightly-longer-than-expected break, I go to work in the e-business infrastructure team in the IT department of an American bulge-bracket I-bank.
Spring '04 - I switch to the Fixed Income, FX and Commodities division, to join the team that runs the electronic trading systems used by the bond and swaps traders.
Christ, you're a candidate for oxygen-rationing if I ever saw one.
I didn't already own a computer because (a) my previous employer provided me with one which I was kind of obliged to return when I handed in my resignation, and (b) I'm not some kind of fetishist geek who likes to fill his home with hardware so he can get home from work and jack off whilst downloading the latest AC kernel patches.
Even now, I'm writing this on a 5-year old Gateway P-500 laptop with 128MB RAM, running Windows '98. Ya know why? Because all I use it for is the odd email/surfing session and I have another HD loaded with Red Hat for when I want to do something that Windows can't do.
If you were ever lucky enough to encounter someone who was stupid enough to involve you in a start-up, you'd realise that at the beginning of a start-up, you have nothing except the founders, the money and the idea. You have to find an office, you have to source office IT equipment, furniture, a phone system, etc. Unless, that is, you're stupid and extravagant enough to go to some serviced offices rip-off joint and blow your investors' cash on some plush joint which you equip with the latest and most up-to-date PCs which you then use for nothing more than email and writing Word documents.
I used easyEverything for about a fortnight, until my colleagues had found us an office, by which time I had everything lined up and only had to press the "Submit" button to order the office PCs, network equipment and printer, call in the cabling guys, get the lines installed and order an Ascom small-office PBX system.
Get back in your fuckin' box and don't dare express an opinion in my presence again. And just as a fuckin' coup de grace:
The computer you were hired by...
I'm not Case, you fuckwit. I was hired by a company, not a computer.
How the fuck do people like you manage to earn enough money to afford an Internet connection? I guess you're either on welfare or work into the telco infustry.
Back in 1999, two guys who'd come up with a dot-com startup idea and managed to raise seed funding, recruited me to be the technical guy (CTO, if you like) for the company. Right at the beginning, the company consisted of the two founders, me, a business plan and £800k in a bank account.
At the time, I didn't have a computer and, besides, dialling into the Internet from home during the day in the UK at the time would have incurred a not-inconsiderable phone bill so, until we got ourselves an office, I worked out of the easyEverything cyber cafe opposite Charing Cross station in London and I used to meet people in the Starbucks just up from Embankment tube station.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and as the business I helped start up didn't survive, the mudslingers can claim that we were a failure. However, our investors were happy that we had achieved what we had set out to do with the seed capital they had put up. I'll tell you this much - there were an awful lot of investors who were a lot less happy than ours.
It was kinda like a gold rush - some people sold out for a fortune or survived the crash and are still going; others went bust or decided to cut their losses before they went bust. Sure, there was hubris and some amazingly incompetent people were given stupid amounts of money to essentially burn but there were also a lot of guys who had good ideas who saw an opportunity to make them happen and, like all entrepreneurs, some were successful and others weren't.
Five years after the event, there's a lot of self-proclaimed experts who'll spout on about irrational exuberance and all the rest but very, very few of them were actually there at the time and even fewer actually took the plunge and got stuck in. Some might say that reflects well upon their judgement but like I said, I have no regrets and the holier-than-thou spouting of someone who's never walked the walk is only so much line noise.
Jack
I work on electronic trading systems for one of the big investment banks and I take care of the GUIs used by our fixed income traders for trading both cash and derivative instruments on all the exchanges mentioned here - Eurex, LIFFE, CME, CBoT - as well as many, many others.
I've been following this issue and I hope that TT's patents will be challenged and overturned. Here's why (note that you should read this and then read the two patents.
Futures exchanges are generally order-drive - i.e. you submit an order to buy/sell a certain amount of a particular instrument at a certain price. There are hundreds of market participants, and they all want to do different things. For a given instrument - Al might want to buy 100 contracts at 100.00, Bob might want to sell 50 contracts at 100.01, Charles wants to buy 1200 contracts at 99.99, Dave also wants to at 99.99, but he only wants 77 contracts, and Egon wants to sell 492 contracts at 100.02.
Now, a typical way of showing this in a graphical manner is as follows:
NB: Apologies for the crap formatting. The extra spaces are Slash's fault - if you're confused, pipe it through 'tr -d` `' - or, if you're a lamer, cut'n'paste it into an editor and delete the spaces.
'Bid' means 'Buy' and 'Offer' means sell. 'BQ' and 'OQ' stand for 'Bid Quantity' and 'Offer Quantity' respectively. Note how Charles and Dave's orders are added together.
Now, the term for this sort of representation, is the "depth". If I'm a trader looking at this, I know that, if I want to (and assuming the depth doesn't change before I submit my order), I can sell 100 contracts at 100.00 and/or sell 1277 contracts at 99.99.
So, how obvious is it to represent the depth as a horizontal bar chart?
Now, let's say I decide to sell 50 contracts at 100.00 - i.e. I want to 'hit' that 'bid' (the opposite is to 'lift' someone's offer). Do I want to click on a 'Place Order' button, then select which instrument it is from a list, tick a 'Buy'/'Sell' radio button and type in the quantity and price before hitting select?
Do I hell! I want to click on the '100' and have a "Submit Order" pop-up appear straight away with the 'Instrument', 'Quantity' and 'Price' fields pre-filled, with a big fat 'Submit' button that I hit to send the order to the market. The order goes in, the exchange's order matching system matches it against Al's order and executed the trade. I then get a pop-up that says "You've just sold 50 contracts at 100.00" and Al gets a pop-up saying "You've just bought 50 contracts at 100.00".
The depth will then change to look like this:
Now, let's say that by some amazing coincidence, I have 1377 contracts that I want to sell. I can get out my calculator and figure out that if I offload my position by hitting those two bids (I neither know nor care that the 1277 bid is actually two orders), I'll get an average price of approx. 99.99073.
Or, how about instead of having to pull out my calculator, my GUI calculates and displays this automatically, as follows:
- The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
- Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
- When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
- FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
- Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)
The last one's fiction, but well worth reading.Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.
Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.
Jack
I wasn't being defensive - I thought you were asking a genuine question...
Didn't I tell you to get back in your box?
- Summer 1996 - Dropped out of university. Unemployed. No qualifications. On the dole.
- September '96 - Start "working" at small ISP for £10 per day cash in hand (and free 'Net access, obviously), answering tech support lines and earning extra for stuff like web page design and doing sales/consultancy for companies who want to get online.
- Late '97 - ISP gets taken over by a small telco. I become "Technical Sales Manager", then a project manager.
- Mid '98 - Get worried that I'm becoming a clueless manager, so quit and get a job as a unix systems engineer with a digital asset management solutions provider.
- Nov '99 - Get recruited into aforementioned dot-com.
- Summer 2000 - Following the bursting of the dot-com bubble and corresponding drastic plunge in prospects of getting the first-round funding we'd have needed to turn the venture profitable, we wind up the company whilst still solvent, returning over half the seed investors' cash. Wary of the industry, I hold fire on various job offers from dot-coms and consultancies and instead take a 3-month contract, setting up e-commerce infrastructure at Deutsche Bank.
- Spring '02 - "Three months" turned out to last 18 months and I finally depart DB after setting up a bunch of their Equities division's e-commerce systems (e.g. dbconvertibles.com, ederivatives.db.com, www.xavex.com).
- Summer '02 - After a slightly-longer-than-expected break, I go to work in the e-business infrastructure team in the IT department of an American bulge-bracket I-bank.
- Spring '04 - I switch to the Fixed Income, FX and Commodities division, to join the team that runs the electronic trading systems used by the bond and swaps traders.
I think that just about covers it...Jack
I didn't already own a computer because (a) my previous employer provided me with one which I was kind of obliged to return when I handed in my resignation, and (b) I'm not some kind of fetishist geek who likes to fill his home with hardware so he can get home from work and jack off whilst downloading the latest AC kernel patches.
Even now, I'm writing this on a 5-year old Gateway P-500 laptop with 128MB RAM, running Windows '98. Ya know why? Because all I use it for is the odd email/surfing session and I have another HD loaded with Red Hat for when I want to do something that Windows can't do.
If you were ever lucky enough to encounter someone who was stupid enough to involve you in a start-up, you'd realise that at the beginning of a start-up, you have nothing except the founders, the money and the idea. You have to find an office, you have to source office IT equipment, furniture, a phone system, etc. Unless, that is, you're stupid and extravagant enough to go to some serviced offices rip-off joint and blow your investors' cash on some plush joint which you equip with the latest and most up-to-date PCs which you then use for nothing more than email and writing Word documents.
I used easyEverything for about a fortnight, until my colleagues had found us an office, by which time I had everything lined up and only had to press the "Submit" button to order the office PCs, network equipment and printer, call in the cabling guys, get the lines installed and order an Ascom small-office PBX system.
Get back in your fuckin' box and don't dare express an opinion in my presence again. And just as a fuckin' coup de grace:
I'm not Case, you fuckwit. I was hired by a company, not a computer.How the fuck do people like you manage to earn enough money to afford an Internet connection? I guess you're either on welfare or work into the telco infustry.
Jack
Back in 1999, two guys who'd come up with a dot-com startup idea and managed to raise seed funding, recruited me to be the technical guy (CTO, if you like) for the company. Right at the beginning, the company consisted of the two founders, me, a business plan and £800k in a bank account.
At the time, I didn't have a computer and, besides, dialling into the Internet from home during the day in the UK at the time would have incurred a not-inconsiderable phone bill so, until we got ourselves an office, I worked out of the easyEverything cyber cafe opposite Charing Cross station in London and I used to meet people in the Starbucks just up from Embankment tube station.
Jack