So here's a scary thought: quants, the wiz4rd5 behind our brave new automated markets, write their masterpieces in VBA. That's right, the "unthinkably complex financial instruments" that journalists have been gushing over for the last few years are written in Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic's lead-poisoned little brother. [As if Visual Basic isn't dumb enough already.]
William Gibson made the job sound so sexy back in 1997 with Idoru. It's hilarious that in real life they're a bunch of physics nerds with Excel spreadsheets. Knowing this makes me want to ensure my retirement by implanting a thimble-sized piece of gold in my abdomen. I'm constantly astonished that anything, anywhere, ever works at all.
3 comments:
So, I noticed you're changing the title of the Blog from time to time. I have a suggestion for the next title:
Chuck's Blog-O-Scorn
byline: Scorn served up daily! Now piss off!
:-)
I mean, even poor little ol' PBS couldn't escape your wrath! :-)
That's the best name so far! You've captured the soul of my blog: pissy whanging on any topic. Perhaps that will be my new tagline.
PBS pisses me off. But then, really, what doesn't?
Having a quant as a good friend, this was not a surprise to me.
What's even more awesome is that the FOREX company I worked for was getting live price feeds from one of the largest banks on the planet - prices that were generated and fed directly out of an Excel spreadsheet.
At one time it was tempting to join the high-roller life of finance and trading. But then I realized that as an actual software engineer, I'd probably end up crying myself to sleep every night...
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