March 29, 2007
NUM_TRADES_RT
I think there are precious few canned screens on the Bloomberg for finding stock trading ideas. There’s one called “LVI” (Largest Volume Increase) which is just a simple screen comparing today’s or yesterday’s volume with a 1-, 5-, 20-, or 90-day average of volume, ranked by percentage change. It screens by exchange but doesn’t offer China’s, though it does have HK’s, Taiwan’s, etc.
I think the deal with the Bloomberg is that everyone builds scanners and other tools (usually in Excel?) that use the feed. I was looking at the fields available through their API: a mere 25,000 or so (including 246 real time fields). Impressive.
I should have taken the money spent on business school and leased a Bloomberg terminal and explored it for fourteen months instead. With the savings, I could have gone to night school at DeVry in New Brunswick and learned how to program instead. In other words, I could have done something useful and productive, instead of getting a stupid MBA. Live and learn. (My son will know better.)
March 29th, 2007 at 6:26 pm
I kinda agree with you. I got my MBA at a Tech focused college (you know which one) where I learned about neural net modeling, decision modeling, and other techie related business stuff. That I found valuable.
Now I’m trying to teach myself VB so I can build Excel models and stream IB real time feeds.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
New Brunswick, eh. Girlfriend is from up in Campbellton, but i’m one of those suckers with an MBA.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
Tom: Didn’t you go to Rutgers? I met some nice girls at business school, that’s about it.
Bret: New Brunswick, New Jersey. ;-) You’re less of a sucker if you know you’re a sucker.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:00 pm
you said it my brother! did you know you can get a BU- Bloomberg University certificate training? Call Bloomberg or hit BU and Go on your Bloomberg. Hey I was wondering if you could start posting your unusual vol. w/ small floats screen again.
Best,
Kai
March 29th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I feel like I am in the opposite position. I have a degree in Computer Science but I’d like to go back to get my MBA. Lots of math sense, not a lot of business sense.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
CM: I went to that college across the street from Rutgers in Newark. You know the one where they give you pocket protectors in your welcome packet! :)
March 29th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
redbridge: Yes, I did know that but I checked out the training in Beijing and it’s all in Chinese (which I could do, but it would be a pain.) Unusual volume/small float? Don’t remember that screen. Did I use Metastock to make it?
Dan: The last thing an MBA will give you is business sense.
Tom: Oh yeah, now I remember.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
Perhaps not, but it will open doors for me afterwards. Right now all I am is a dev, I have no finance,accounting,mgmt backround. Not exactly an easy thing to overcome when you are competing for a position with people who do.
March 29th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
CM: Too bad we never met then.
March 29th, 2007 at 10:08 pm
I got my MBA and MS in Finance from a top-20 ranked U.S. university… I still haven’t done anything with that education. I think the only thing you get from it is credibility from the business folks.
My undergrad was in Computer Science, and I value that knowledge more than anything… I’m currently writing automated trading software for traders worldwide.
March 29th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence…
All my b-school friends wish they had the coding/execution experience I have instead of their degrees… while I wish I had the b-school stamp of approval that they so easily dismiss…
We all seem to think our own experience has impacted our world very little, while we think others have the answers/abilities we are missing…
That said, I wish I had put money into a bloomberg terminal instead of sending it to those guys in Nigeria… ;)
March 29th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Brant: The MS in Finance is good (my wife has an MS in Finance and is a CFA) … the MBA is just a union card, it’ll open doors in the corporate world, especially if you went to a Top 20 school, but who wants to be a suit?
March 30th, 2007 at 4:58 am
Exactly… I did my stint in management consulting, but hated working the long hours as a suit. The MS in Finance is more worthwhile than the MBA, but I just got it because my schooling was free (paid for by company). I enjoyed the derivatives and risk management classes, but not enough to get me back in the corporate world. Just trading the e-minis right now, and don’t want to go back.
March 30th, 2007 at 6:54 am
ok Ill weigh in on this, I got a BA in Economics from Middlebury in 1972, long before you guys were born… and it took me 5 or 6 years to get over not wanting or having an MBA.. For a while I was a suit, but for almost the last 20 years, Ive been an NoN Suit, working only for myself… by myself… Im not rich, but I raised my kids myself (wifey took off, wanted the suit) and now I can say, I saved the MBA tuition only to use it up learning to trade… I would do it again just the same way… PEACE
March 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am
BP: I was born in 1970. ;-) All wives want suits, unfortunately.
March 30th, 2007 at 8:41 am
My dad was originally from New Brunswick, Grandfather and great grandfather, see my blog, lived on Livingston Ave, commuted to NYC.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:00 am
>All my b-school friends wish they had the coding/execution experience I have instead of their degrees..
Are you serious? Can you elaborate on this? I would think trader/quant (ie: decision maker w/ the secret sauce) is much higher on the heirarchy than a coder (glorified plubler who is just routing data and creating reports) OF the two, the latter is much more of a replacable, generic commodity. (ie: Cost-center, and necc. evil.)
Can’t imagine anyone who is the biz/mba/trader wanting to step “down” to being a coder behind the scenes.
Lead actor vs. key grip
March 30th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Oh, how can you feel like that?
I am pretty sure that the traditional training (MBA) molded your way of thinking, to allow you to say I want done this way. Whereas, the D school you would know how to do it, but you would not have think of it to do it the first place. Think about it.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:55 am
shaun: No, I think my undergraduate schooling made me a more critical thinker (I went to Hamilton, where they pushed thinking, reading and writing — a classic liberal arts education, which I recommend). And when I went to business school nearly ten years later, life had already molded and solidified my ways of thinking.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
MBA could help you find a good job in China while programming couldn’t:).
March 30th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
agg: I’m not so sure … they’re both a dime a dozen and I’d prefer to work with Indian and Bangladeshi programmers.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:31 am
MBA’s are useless for trading. Any decent BS in Finance is enough. No amount of common sense is.
April 4th, 2007 at 5:40 am
Most of the engineering professors are not good engineers. Likewise, most of the MBAs, even quants, are indoctrinated with the EMH, MPT,and random walk models, to an extend that they already gave up trading even before trying. Warren Buffet once said that he kept funding business schools to perpetuate that kind of teaching, so that he himself can make profits in an ‘alleged efficient’ market. :-)
April 4th, 2007 at 5:58 am
I don’t think Warren Buffet is a trader. I do think most would consider Warren Buffet as an investor.
Based on what George say…guess we here in the USA do not have good engineering school, do not have good business school and the way things are going not good in any thing. Happy belated April Fools Day
April 5th, 2007 at 3:12 am
Shaun60: no one said that Warren Buffet is a trader.
Even for exact physical sciences as engineering, there’s a big difference between the academic scholars and real life practioners. USA does have good engineering schools, but most of the professors there are concerned with writing theoretical papers, while engineers have to deal with the real world.
Trading and investing are more games than exact sciences,what MBAs learned from the ivory towers certainly are not that useful for the trading arena in real life.