On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:57:53 -0500, John Fields
wrote:

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:14:55 -0700, John Larkin
wrote:

On Wed, 28 Mar 2012 13:54:56 -0700, Joel Koltner
wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:
Check out these links....

http://tinyurl.com/7lfn7y8
http://tinyurl.com/c5hrbr

Were you hoping MIT would be #1 in both? :-)

Annoying that the second link ranks the hot categories in engineering
as, "computer, mechanical, civil." So much for electrical...

Hmm... ~$40k/year at MIT just for tuition... probably around $50k with
housing and books and what-not? $200k for a four-year degree? That's
just... incredible...

Too bad they don't rate schools on a basis along the lines of value of
education received per dollar of tuition.

Increasingly, grads of Harvard, Princeton, and MIT are working on Wall
Street. "Quants", they are called, using their math skills to skim
hundredths of a percent off the stock market.

---
How does that work, exactly?

I don't know the details, but there are companies that have set up
just next door to the NYSE and such, to shave milliseconds off their
transaction delays. They spot tiny differences in buy/sell
opportunities and trade stocks for literally seconds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_trading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_trading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading


This, done by hundreds of players, could have interesting
instabilities.

This sounds like pure parasitism to me, and soaks up some of the best
math grads in the country. A small transaction tax would kill this
off.


--

John Larkin, President
Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
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