I'm sure many of you guys do some trick over stocks in spreadsheet. Full explanation: https://medium.com/automation-generation/manage-your-stocks-...
These spreadsheets are truly amazing, I've only seen glimpses of these spreadsheets but they were massive, nothing like needed to have servers in the local network cabinet and running cables for keyboard, video and mouse, because you needed 1/2 a Tb of ram in order to open the spreadsheet.
GS has had a centralized risk/pricing system for over 20 years now that is pretty powerful [2]. Fun fact: GS was able to calculate their total exposure to the Lehman collapse 12 hours after it happened using this.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-buy-financial-... 2. https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/276170/secdb-quartz...
The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows. Our software would have eliminated a lot of what they do in a day, and therefore, would eliminate their jobs as well.
It is terrifying that trillions of dollars of assets are run on excel, but the inertia is too strong.
But what they really wanted to say is "we will have to repurpose 200 staff who process these checks and mail out statements, and they're all 30 year veterans, and I don't have the heart to tell them they're fired even though they are the sole reason we lose money"
Giving up that control is hard.
Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.
Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.
As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.
After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.
Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)
One cyber-breach and all that really nice clean code is readily understandable to your competitors.
When did software devs lack the power to write trading tools? The issue is that the traders had the knowledge and wrote their ideas into a spreadsheet which was not only maintainable for them but easily extensible. I cannot overstate that second part. They become spreadsheet behemoths because it's trivial to make them do that one extra thing (at least for the first fifty or so features).
There are so much sunk costs ( decades of excel worksheets and decades of technical know-how ) that most companies aren't going to switch to another spreadsheet and migrate all that data and retrain their employees.
I was usually called in to debug these things. My approach was always super minimalist... How do I make the 1 change that will get this all back on its feet again? .... without looking at any of the VBA or the weird DLLs lurking in the shadows.
Having said all that - Google Sheets is actually a different beast. I still wouldn't trade through it. Also, I've been eyeing Alpaca for a while - I like what they're doing. Best of luck to them....
or
A crappy solution was still the best they had at the time. You're going to hate to read what they say about today's solutions in 2028.
This is not an apples to apples comparison to the spider fight world of trading, but there would still be a lot of ingenuity there. And a simple way to limit risk is to ruthlessly review the results, both automatically and manually. Keep going while it works as expected and stop/adjust if there is a major glitch.
If it works...
A spreadsheet on my computer would pull data from Bloomberg using their Excel API and would price the securities. Those prices would be pulled off the spreadsheet by some Reuters application that would then send those numbers through a 56K modem to Reuter's system. Somebody I never met in London would screen scrape the prices from Reuters into Excel. From that Excel spreadsheet the prices would be posted on the Swiss exchange. I was responsible for any resulting trades and they would go into my book.
These were two sided prices (bid-ask) so if the process broke and the market moved I would get picked off. Thankfully they were mostly all delta 1 instruments with 50 bps of spread so that didn't happen too often.
When I need an ad-hoc flexible internal tool, Google sheets is usually the first place I start building.
I'm building out "Idea Meritocracy" tools like those found in Principles(Dalio).
The Google Forms integration is really powerful for mobile input. And event triggers are great for managing what's inputted to the form.
There are a few competitors right now, but they lack a certain feature that I think is important.
Can share more when ready... aka when I've purchased the domain name so it doesn't get squatted.
Does it use any proprietary or other APIs outside of the sheets scripts?
Ping me when it's ready for beta testers
Brian at angularjobs.com
It uses an outside API and that's a big change from existing solutions. Sorry for being cryptic, but if I shared the API it would be obvious. I just want to put final touches on it before doing a Show HN. At that point it'll be obvious :)
Also, I'm managing the "5 Step Process to Get What You Want Out of Life" in the same spreadsheet.
Free: Or paying a very little amount compared with what is considered the norm.
>Paying 7,5 EUR to 15 EUR or more for each transaction gets old quick.
Even if there was a free service in Europe I'm not sure I'd use it due to concerns about fill & execution quality. Or to use an IT analogy...if you're not paying you are the product. In this case via order flow being sold.
Disclaimer: I work at BUX.
EDIT: formatting...
https://KloudTrader.com/Narwhal
Our brokerage is through Tradier.
https://www.robinhood.com/
If you travel to the US most major ones should open an account for you too. But they ban foreign IPs sometimes and unlocking can be hassle.
The only major problem with the US I'm aware of is the death tax exemption for non-residents is only 60000$, so you don't wanna die or need to structure appropriately.
Reference: https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093281?hl=en
> Alpaca will start offering Premium Plan subscriptions, where premium users will have access to various perks, such as higher quality live data feed and more computing resources. The pricing and exact features have not yet been determined. Please stay tuned for updates.
[0] https://support.alpaca.markets/hc/en-us/articles/36001104717...
POST requests with Google Sheets is generally a bad idea since you can't explicitly control when they're sent.
Would be awesome to see how this could be accomplished with the Alpaca API.
- choose your investment theory - set the variables - get monthly/quarterly updates to SELL:X / BUY:Y
...but that's really not so bad. Having an algorithm skim 2 cents/share off of you is a lot better than paying $5+ per trade (assuming you're not trading 1000s of shares, and you're not in penny stocks or options where spreads are big).