MAS and SGX problems are coming home to roost

Whenever I am asked about my interactions with MAS and SGX from my past 10 over years of working experience, I always state that I am underwhelmed by the people in those organizations. A lack of passion, directions and understanding of the financial industry. It seems the problems are coming home to roost.

 A lot of the bad eggs are 'hatching' the recent years. Maybe an accumulation of bad leadership and decisions over the years have lead to an implosion of sorts. Much like the local SMRT train issues and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 where errors were accumulated to an overwhelming state of affairs.

Soros Fund Management doubles bet against the S&P 500 in 1st quarter

Billionaire investor George Soros, who has been warning that the 2008 financial crisis could be repeated due to China's economic slowdown, on Monday disclosed his doubled wager against the S&P 500 in the first quarter.

Soros Fund Management said it owned a 2.1-million-share "put" option in the SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund (ETF) which tracks the benchmark U.S. stock index. That was up from about 1 million shares in the option in the fourth quarter, it said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Hedge Funds Under Attack as Steve Cohen Says Talent Is Thin

In less than seven days, hedge funds have been subject to a three-pronged attack by some of the biggest names in finance.

Steve Cohen, the billionaire trader whose former hedge fund had racked up average annual returns of 30 percent before pleading guilty to securities fraud three years ago, became the latest critic of the business, saying he’s astounded by its shortage of skilled people.

“Frankly, I’m blown away by the lack of talent,” Cohen said at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, on Monday. “It’s not easy to find great people. We whittle down the funnel to maybe 2 to 4 percent of the candidates we’re interested in. Talent is really thin.”

Machine Learning For Stock Trading Strategies

The idea of using computers to trade stocks is hardly new. Algorithmic trading (also known as algo trading or black box trading which is a subset of algo trading) has been around for well over a decade and rapidly gaining in popularity. Here’s a look at algorithmic trading as a percentage of market volume:

 

Source: Morton Glantz, Robert Kissell. Multi-Asset Risk Modeling: Techniques for a Global Economy in an Electronic and Algorithmic Trading Era.

Nine things you need to know about working for systematic macro hedge funds

1. Systematic macro funds use a simple three stage investment process which can be used to trade globally 24 hours a day

1. Collect huge datasets from a diverse range of sources;
2. Analyse the date to find persistent patterns; and finally
3. Encode trading rules into a computer-based program to profit from the identified patterns.

2. Systematic macro hedge funds aren’t limited to trading one particular product or market

3. Systematic macro hedge funds are mostly about identifying and following trends

4. They also look for ‘counter-trends’…

5. And for ‘relative value trends,’ and for ‘seasonal trends’