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I used to follow a lot, and drank a bunch of the kool-aid from Jigsaw Trading. Now I read very little, other than the economic calendar for US/Canada/Europe each morning. I'm looking for high volatility events(such as FOMC, GDP, etc) so I can make sure I am not in the market when they take place.

I haven't read any books about algorithmic trading(but I've read a ton about trading in general...favorite is Mark Douglas's 'Trading in the Zone'). Most of my introduction to algorithmic trading came from a trading platform(Multicharts.NET). I wasn't a .NET programmer specifically, but they include the source code for all indicators/signals that ship with the product. This made it really easy to tinker with automated trading signals, and I don't think I would have ever attempted it without that exposure.

Also, you didn't ask for this piece of advice...but: be very cautious of tips from any blog or news outlet. The people producing those are under tremendous pressure to produce "something", even when there isn't any insight to be had for a day/week/event/etc. They will produce something anyway, relevance be damned. If you needed some help/ideas, you would be better served joining a live trading group. Many of these are free, and they give you a chance to listen(and speak) to other traders, all trading at the same time, usually with the same instruments. I learned some things from GPI Trading Group(http://www.gpitradinggroup.com/) that saved me a lot of time and headache. They are focused on the ZB(bond futures, not equities), but back at that time so was I. I got a lot of feedback from their members about my indicators and automated signals I was working on, and much of it was invaluable.

For your first question: I don't know, but I speculate the majority is hedging.

Second: I get my data from CQG, but you can also get the same feeds from IB. The specific exchange you need for VIX is "CBOE"(http://www.cboe.com/vix). ampfutures.com is a broker that offers this, but there are many(possibly better) others that offer it as well.

Third: Historical data for the depth isn't available from any broker I have used. That said - I'm a retail guy, and there may be options for institutional traders that I'm unaware of. As a retail guy you can buy this data though, just not from a broker. IQFeed offers it(6mo back for market data, and 6mo for 1-tick resolution data) - but it's expensive. The last quote they gave me was $1350/month for CME and CBOE tick-by-tick resolution with 10 levels of depth.

My brain replaced "Ellison" with "Wall", and until the first paragraph I was terribly excited....then not so much.

It's real work, I think you misread the intent on the comment you replied to. While the work is real, it's not on the same scale of complexity and expertise as reverse engineering.

an analogy:

The school nurse putting a band-aid on your knee is "real" medical work, but that same nurse has no place in spinal surgery operating room.

The school nurse is every "certified ethical hacker" and "certified cybersecurity expert". The spinal surgeon is the reverse engineer. We need nurses, but we also need spinal surgeons more. Every spinal surgeon can practice as a school nurse, but (perhaps) 0.1% of school nurses can practice as a spinal surgeon.

It's a postmortem of the mini-crash we saw in February. No one was expecting it, and it happened very fast. One day the Nasdaq futures are trading at 7100, the next day they are at 6100. Moves of 100 points(a whole day's worth of movement) were happening in 15-20 seconds. Just for some context, 100 points(on the Nasdaq) is $2,000 gained or lost, using the minimum size you can trade.

As a former software engineer turned algorithmic commodities trader, my lessons:

* The VIX(futures contract) is the most accurate pulse of the equity futures market I have seen.

* The price of the VIX is no more important intra-day than the depth of the VIX's inside bid/ask.

* When VIX depth adjusts, so do equity future prices, over the course of 5-10 seconds.

* Be fast, I mean really fast. Or better, program your trading platform to be fast so you don't have to.

The person you're replying to is telling you the truth - imbalanced delta for buyers or sellers means rising or falling prices. There is no magical equilibrium, and if there was, there would be no profit.

To explain it a step further... at this moment in time, every private and institutional investors stopped selling APPL...I can still buy a share, likely thousands of them... from the market participants that are always there: market makers. When you make a "bad call"(like selling into a rally), a market maker is likely on the other end of your trade, and they will profit from your "bad call". Now the inverse also applies, often times a market maker is taking the other end of your trade that is a good(profitable) trade for you. The market maker isn't losing though, they are just playing the odds. They are convicted that for every losing trade they take out of obligation(as a market maker), they are going to take 2 or more winning trades. They also operate with trade costs much lower than you or I(ie retail investors) have access to.

That was more reply than I originally intended to write...but you have to understand this(or fail at profitable trading). There is no equilibrium, and there are parties(market makers) ensuring that there never will be. That is their job, to create a state of constant liquidity, even if buyers and/or sellers individually are unwilling to play.

I disagree, I'd argue that exactly 4 times a year, passive funds must sell, and must buy again. Contract expiration dates cause huge volumes of activity from so-called "passive" funds. The seconds, minutes, hours, and (occasionally) days that elapse between rolling out from current month to forward month contracts are all about the fund managers pain threshold. The exception to this rule is if your fund has governance specifying that rollovers have to happen ASAP(as in, as each <N> contracts are sold from the current month, <N> forward month contracts must be bought before repeating the process), which is not common.

edit: Sometimes I'm blinded by the part of "market" I operate within, which is the commodity futures market. I could be(and likely am) completely wrong when you apply this to the securities market, which I am less familiar with.

Black Monday is the edge case

Pascal lost the language war, just like countless other "good" languages. Fantastic that it is working out so well for you, but you are the exception here. You're visible because(at least today) you've managed to post about it 3 times on HN that I have read. Maybe you've posted even more that I haven't seen yet.

Random searches in "dice.com"(pick any job site you want) for "Pascal" yields 5 positions. "Python" yields 8,950. "C++" yields 6008. Even "8086 assembly" yields 1,378 jobs. "Java" yields 17,000+. There is a trend here if you care to see it.

You are obviously passionate about Pascal. That's awesome. Keep using it, and squeeze it for everything its' worth. Please don't be disheartened when technology moves on without you though, often in directions that feel "wrong" to us. Electron feels wrong to me, but it doesn't matter. Technology is going to move where technology is going to move, and sometimes you have to get on board with choices you dislike to avoid being left behind entirely.

PS: I cut my teeth on Pascal in the early 90's, and wish it had become more popular as well.

It's not any different other than the speed it happens at. 20 years ago it would have taken minutes/hours for some of the drops we've seen to materialize. Now you can watch the NQ drop 100 points in less than 5 minutes, 20 years ago that would have taken hours, possibly all day. People had to wait on quote services via satellite, telephone calls to their floor traders, or actually be in the pits during the selloffs. Now it only takes us a couple seconds to connect our device of choice to our trading platforms. Market makers stop providing liquidity during these sell-offs much faster than they could 20 years ago.

>> As the article points out, passive funds, which have become a dominant force in the stock market, own the same stocks as everyone else in the same proportion.

THIS. This is how it works. They also have similar basis prices for their positions, and similar pain thresholds. It's not a big surprise that when Institution XYZ reaches its' pain threshold and stop loss orders are used, a few more dozen Institution ABC, DEF, and GHI hit theirs also! This looks like a "huge selloff" on a chart, but it's just the same event being experienced by multiple institutions near the same point in time.

tldr: it looks like a herd because it is a herd.

Geezus, not that type of health insurance. We're an insurance provider over a century old, blue cross and blue something or other. We're not in the business of death panels, and we have similar feelings towards the tin-foil-hat wearing masses that Catholic priests likely have towards people who assume since some priests are pedophiles, they must all be pedophiles. Some insurance companies(in the minority) are driven by greed and have a reputation that reflects that. Not all priests are pedos, and not all(or any that I've heard of) insurance providers are murderous thugs trying to extract every last cent of wealth from their customers. We're a non-profit organization for that matter. If we somehow extracted a ton of wealth, we wouldn't be allowed to keep it anyway.

We have some strict(and irritating for profit-centric people) governance... one of the more interesting pieces of governance is called the "85/15 rule", which roughly translated, means that if we take in $100 dollars, the government mandates we use $85 of them to pay your costs, and $15 to pay our staff, light bills, and any other expense we have. If we end up only using $80 to pay your costs, we have to refund the remaining $5 to your group plan.

Here's the obvious secret about health insurance that people like to have conspiracy theories about..I can't speak for other institutions in other countries, however...our stance is really simplistic: you can't pay premiums if you are not alive, therefore it is in our mutual interest for you to remain alive. All the conspiracy theories such as "but you don't want that cancer patient in your insurance group plan!" are just that..conspiracy theories. We absolutely do want that person in the group, because then that group's rates go up! The costs for that patient's care are more or less fixed(and known), built on the assumption of a terminal outcome. We're going to pay for it anyway, and try to make that miserable experience as pleasant as possible for everyone involved. That type of service is how you get repeat business, and a good reputation.

This likely falls on deaf ears. Feel free to return to the zealous insurance hatred, and I'm going to return to writing code. Not for death panel machines. Promise.

>> Those massive gains have yet to considered reliable enough to be considered trusthworthy.

We're using them at Generic Health Insurance Megacorp in production - lots of enterprises are. If you are in the IT industry, it might be useful to spend some lab time with ML. Possibly you have a misconception of ML and/or confuse it with AI.

I thought we were computing the question, since the answer is known to be 42.

Peel and freeze your bananas before they go bad. Use the frozen bananas for smoothies, or thaw them for cooking(eg banana bread).

This is incorrect. Orders and their distribution in the order book is called liquidity. Alone, they have very little meaning, and are often manipulated in the securities and commodities market(ie: you see a 5,000 bid, and place your own 5,000 ask - suddenly the bid is gone, and your ask gets rolled by huge buy orders). "Buy/sell curve" has no meaning, the closest term would be "yield curve", such as US interest rates. As the rate climbs and falls, there are inverse effects on financial instruments.

The CME started trading futures contracts for BTC in December of last year. Since then, it's been a downward spiral in terms of price. With the CME involved, it means banks(let that sink in) are trading against you. Their pain threshold exceeds yours(and all of ours), and you will lose every time betting against them.

He'e eluding(likely) to the commodities market. You can make double your money on a mediocre trade. You can also lose 100% of your money on a similar mediocre trade.

Other side of the coin here..you can take that 1 million USD and dump it in a single order into the ES - you won't move it more than 1, 2, or maybe 3 ticks. This assumes you are using full day margin rates - if you are using overnight rates, you won't move it a single tick. Securities and ETF's are amateur hour for real sums of money. You'll need hundreds of millions, or billions, to move markets with the depth of the ES, ZB, TN, and other commodity futures.

Forget the 3rd party exchanges with their homegrown APIs. If you are dealing with size(1k+), you go straight to the CME and trade crypto futures contracts. Dealing with the CME also adds the regulation necessary(ie CFTC) for your investors.

Hire a financial adviser - ask friends or relatives with similar net worth about their advisers. A good adviser can give you peace of mind, and help you avoid an awful lot of undesirable scenario's. I would suggest a fee-based adviser with fiduciary responsibility. That person will have a vested interest in preserving and growing your wealth, since their fee is a portion of that growth. Also, congratulations! Celebrate with your family and don't buy any lambos.

SQLite is pretty bulletproof and tested in this area. Lots of examples for your project to take advantage of, and very high performance for in-memory data sets.

What mounting evidence? What actions make him an active conspirator in that specific domain?

Holy smokes! He cuts(with a lot of torque) towards his unprotected hand with a box cutter. This looks really cool, but that made me cringe.

Funny how the world has evolved. A couple hundred years ago, natives killing a member of another civilization usually resulted in that civilization sending a militia to exterminate/enslave those natives. The times have changed.

>> Also, can these evangelists take a break? It's not 1600s anymore.

One of the Christian figurehead's final commands is paraphrased as "Go and preach the good news to everyone in the world". I speculate that's what these people are doing.

>> Codebases should not be using extensions, and Linux is wrong to do so.

Why? If you can improve the performance/security/stability of Linux by re-writing functionality without extensions, by all means do so(and send in a patch). Why is Linux "wrong" for this?

>> because you'll never find someone else who understands any of these at a time when it would actually be useful.

I understand what you are saying, but I'm going to make a guess here... you have never served in the military, have you? There is a whole subset of the population(veterans) around you, who had (from the article) smoke signals, hand signals, and morse code drilled into our heads. We may be rusty, but it's like riding a bike. It might not be as nifty as making a fire by rubbing 2 sticks together, but a couple of us each with a piece of broken glass can communicate miles away by signal flashing morse code.

Also, the article was about communicating. Your reply seems to be more about self-preservation during an emergency. There is some overlap in those 2 domains, but they are not the same.

This sounds unpleasant...but I don't know why she rejected their offers so many times. If you don't seem suspicious at first, why shun all attempts at "official" contact? I'm not saying that it's her fault or anything of that nature, just that it might have went a bit smoother if she had been more forthcoming(whether or not she was compelled to). That must have been frightening though to suddenly have the fuzz at the foot of your bed though - very uncool of law enforcement to behave that way. Perhaps that's not as out of the norm as it seems to me(someone from the West).