I've read much of Matasano's work and would love to join. Are you truly "always hiring", or would you recommend starting a dialogue sooner rather than later?
I promised myself that I wouldn't apply/interview until I get the OSCP out of the way this month, but would hate to watch a good opportunity slip away.
Yes, we are really always hiring. Don't feel like this any particular bar you need to reach; you can't waste our time. We interview all sorts of people with all sorts of backgrounds. Some fit, some don't, but not neceessarily the one's you'd think.
We also have a history of interiewing the same person repeatedly. I myself interviewed twice before I came to Matasano. There's nothing wrong with realizing it's not a good fit at this time, and coming back around at a later date. Seriously, you can't waste our time.
Technical analysis is far from useless. As an active trader, it's the best tool I have come across. I'm sorry, but to say that it is useless is to admit pure ignorance, or to admit your failure to grasp the concepts and understand how to apply them visually and correctly.
People do apply techniques incorrectly, yes. They can get confirmation bias from it, yes. However, that does not invalidate successful traders who trade primarily on technicals. Keep in mind that a "tool" is just that - but not used the same way by everyone - and "this means that" isn't a blanket rule that always works as described. Everything is part of a larger structural puzzle. Also, HFT algos will eat your lunch if your hold period is too short. I don't hold a position for more than a week, MAYBE two, but never less than 45 minutes - and as a retail trader, that makes a huge difference in P/L ratios over time.
Through my trading experience I have continuously used less fundamentals and more wonky technical techniques I have come up with. It has given me a massive edge over whoever is on the other side of the trade, and has pulled me quite a long way out of debt and into making a nice living doing it on the side. The side of the story that you don't see in the endless "get rich quick" trading schemes that promise to teach you all of those super awesome secrets is that anyone who knows what they're doing isn't spending any time teaching it to the masses.
But, to get back on topic: Well done with this site! It's a great beginner guide to understand what a lot of the basics actually mean. Babypips falls very short.
If that is the case, it would create a market inefficiency which some other market participant could come along and exploit (anticipate the TAs moves and act preemptively). Your statement is basically saying there is no one out there smart enough to do this.
Not necessarily! Suppose a bunch of noise traders are piling into a stock because all seven green lights are on in the software they bought for 29.95 from an infomercial. Let's take as an assumption that this algorithm has no idea what it's doing. The smart money thing to do would be to buy now (since investors are going to keep buying as they notice their text alerts or sound alarms or whatever tells them to buy the stock) then sell again knowing full well you are driving the price further from fundamentals in the short term. The best response to past irrationality is to trade against it. The best response to future irrationality is to trade with it. That irrational behavior might be forecast-able should not be a huge surprise.
Momentum is a well established empirical regularity in stock prices. Knowing this, you trade with the momentum at then trade against it later. This does not help momentum go away.
What do you think a good portion of HFT algos do? Of course people are exploiting the order flow that comes as a result of generic "signals".
But my point is that technical ANALYSIS is the utilization of TOOLS. People apply tools in different ways. Especially with fibonacci, there is certainly not one way to trade using fibonacci retracements, extensions, time, harmonics, etc.. I know traders who use it completely differently than I do. What matters is how it's applied to a chart and how trading decisions are made based on how the trader interprets what they're seeing.
It sounds like you guys are describing things like MA crosses to be useless. How they're normally applied by new traders is "the red crossed the green, so I sold", then they get mad when they lose money on the trade (and blame technical analysis). Yet, a moving average is a tool which can be tweaked in numerous ways - how you tweak/apply/interpret/trade using that tool is an entirely other question. Nobody in the right mind should be trading using only one tool, or by applying an "out of the box" charting tool then just blindly making decisions based on that.
Liken this to a software context: "Sensitive data can get stolen, so software is BAD". Yet, it's really just how it's written, up/downsides that are inherent of the language it's written in, but mainly HOW it was designed and how businesses utilized or tweaked it. You can't generalize the entire software industry because of security holes.
If you reduce technical analysis to generic "super awesome signal, works every time!" marketing ploys, you'll miss one of the best edges you could possibly have in trading/investing.
Note: This disagreement is a perfect example of why volume exists on each side of the market.
This article's premise is built on an incorrect understanding of "treating" or "fixing" or "losing" (symptoms).
If: baseline x is underwhelming to the point of painful boredom
Else: baseline y is higher and therefore satisfyingly stimulating
Then the fundamental problem of a lacking reward system for "normal" (x) baseline activity remains unresolved.
I have ADHD and decided to try medication for the first time only a few years ago (in my 20's). Sure, keeping things "interesting" and "new" can trick one's mind into paying additional attention towards the daily grind, but not for one second does that mean that ADHD would be resolved.
To make a more clear point, let's apply this thinking to another context: Murderers would be cured if there weren't anyone to murder, right? No. You're supposed to solve problems, not symptoms.
That's the thing, I think. Treatment (both cognitive behavioral therapy and chemical) has enabled me to get on with my life in so many ways.
It's not about getting rid of the symptoms - they're still there. It's about knowing when your symptoms are getting the better of you -- and taking agency over them. If my brain is a wall of TV's all tuned to different channels with the volume turned to 11, adderal finally gave me a clicker to be able to turn all but one off. Or, at least, mute.
And in many ways, I'm glad I'm not asymptomatic on medication: many of the downsides of ADHD can actually be huge, huge upsides. I thought it would kill my creative problem solving, going on meds: if anything, it's put it into overdrive. Instead of stashing something in my subconscious and hoping a solution percolates up a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks later ... I can pick up the puzzle, look at it, really concentrate and think about it. It's a life changing thing to realize what it's like to actually ruminate on a problem. On the other hand, I still make the zany off the wall connections between two problems that let me come up with a solution to both of them.
Instead of hoping for the luck of the draw, though, I can stack the deck.
I 100% agree. People think ADD/ADHD is "resolved" on meds, but it's not the case. They started me on 27mg of Concerta, then 54mg, then I was (thankfully) moved to Vyvanse and titrated my way up to 60mg. The story hasn't changed - it's still valuable to leverage the downsides into strength. An ADD/ADHD brain is certainly a chaotic one, but going on meds has enabled me to do better planning/execution and to actually complete tasks. Your wall of TVs analogy is great - I often describe my head as the similar murmur you hear from a crowd. Thoughts are like white noise where it's nearly impossible to pick the right one out, let alone stay with it for a while when it's so easy to hear everything else on top of it.
Not to sound skitzo, but I think the meds do a great job of quieting that noise. While medicated, I have the ability to plan a task or project, execute each step, and actually stick with it to the end. It's still possible to get off task, and perhaps worse if you do (since then you're REALLY focused on being off task), but the meds still help me think. But that is where it stops. They don't resolve problems - they provide most of the tools needed to change the way you think so you can work on resolving them yourself.
Now, to the popular point of diet and exercise; I'm sure it's a mix of improved medication delivery, the natural stress relief, and the endorphin benefit that comes with it - but eating well and regularly exercising seems to amplify the medication's benefit by 15-20%. Those two things are marginally helpful without meds, along with several other "natural remedies" that I have tried, but I think a combination of all of the above is key.
My original point was just that the article makes it sound like symptoms should be treated via introducing new parts to the equation which ultimate distract people from boring situations. Yet, ADD/ADHD in its TRUE FORM works 100% independent of one's desire to pay attention. The argument of "BUT VIDEO GAMES ARE FINE SO IT'S CLEARLY CHOICE" is 100% falsified by Dr. Thomas E Brown's research. He provides such excellent insight - I am so fortunate to have met him.
I'll close this novel of a post with an analogy made by Dr. Brown when we met:
"Picture a massive old wooden sailboat with dozens of crew frantically fighting to pull the sails, keep up with the demands of their job, etc. Non-ADD/ADHD folk can get a benefit from medication, but it just speeds up both the captain and crew.
ADD/ADHD folk, on the other hand, are instead sailing through a terrible storm at a much faster pace than normal and can hardly see - but the crew still keep up with their jobs. The captain is the problem. In this case, the captain is the only one sped up by the meds, and suddenly, no matter how chaotic and messy that voyage is, it's all under control."
Used to work in the DNS business. "It will take up to 24 hours to propagate" is a way to manage expectations and prevent support calls from coming in within the first 24 hours after a DNS change, not a reflection of actual DNS propagation times.
I don't know how things work now, but at least a few years ago there were plenty of DNS server that would take basically the full 48hours to update, regardless of TTL.
I'm not a netadmin, so don't know the innards of how it all works, but one day I watched a domain of ours pointing to an amazon load-balancer spread across multiple AZs - the IP address would change in DNS every so often, flipping between the AZs, presumably.
Implementations will differ for "elastic" software defined load balancing so understand this is not a definitive statement applicable to all cloud service providers. In the case of AWS a default ELB set to serve one zone might have one IP. If it is configured to serve to 3 zones it may then have 3 IP addresses. These are minimums and they do change randomly so AWS warns you not o set A Records to IPs of those.
This is not hardware. This is software defined networking which you should apply one of the rules of good cloud design which is to expect failure - and this is a feature - IPs change. Deal with it. ;)
Further we have the TTL issue noted and an very interesting thing happens there. If you use a default of say 300 or more seconds for your FQDN in the DNS record which has even a CNAME to an ELB set of FQDNs (if multiple ELBs for example) then your going to have a condition at some times where that 300 seconds is still ticking down when the say 60 second TTL for the ELB's fqdn expires and or the ELB IP itself has changed. In that time span your resolved IP may be assigned to another ELB and traffic going to your platform hits some other platform. So perhaps at the first 1 second mark of your 300 second TTL start the AWS ELB TTL has expired and perhaps is assigned to nothing - your traffic gets failure to connect - then the IP is assigned to some other FQDN and your traffic hits some other ELB. (Your church patrons now get porn perhaps.) The flip side is true and interesting to watch in logs.
How to take advantage of this feature? Oh that is fun. Marketing? Route all such identifiable traffic to good bad or ugly ends?
I hate the term "DNS propagation". It confuses people, and makes them think things that aren't true, like a new domain isn't usable until it "propagates" through the Internet.
We tell clients that we've launched their site, but that the DNS changes might take up to 48 hours to propagate.
Realistically, from our office and to most of the world it's probably live within 5 minutes. One of our local ISPs happens to be one of those irritating ones that just ignores your TTL and caches records for days at a time.
Sometimes one of their servers will end up with the new record and one with the old. That combined with peoples' home routers caching records (again, sometimes ignoring TTLs) can lead to fun situations where the site might load fine for a couple hours (hit the good ISP server, local router cached) then the old site for a couple of hours (hit the bad server, local router cached...).
I used to try and explain it to people but after having enough people freak out about how their site switched back, it's not live yet, etc, etc... I just tell them it's going to take 48 hours. If it's visible earlier it's a pleasant surprise, and if it takes two days I don't get any panicked phone calls.
True. It absolutely depends on the specific contract each of them signed. If the contract were to say "Not satisfied? Full refund!" or anything like that, they technically are not under contract to NOT use the code.
They would literally have legal basis, in that case, to run a startup from the very code they refused to pay for. Albeit unethical, it would be legal.
Either way, the contract would clear this up. It's still bad press. With $2M in funding, just pay the dev and move on with a stable image of doing the right thing even if it isn't legally required to do so.
