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galen211's comments

galen211 | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to stay engaged in your career?

In an analogous situation. I try to think of my current work as a stepping stone to other opportunities, but admittedly it's tough. I'm also genuinely interested in data science, but am skeptical that to do data science you have to 'retool'. I think it's about striking a balance between the skills you have and developing in areas that make you more productive. Good employers know how to motivate people and keep them engaged (if they speak up).

galen211 | 8 years ago | on: I wandered off and built an IDE

This is great - I refuse to mess with VBA and I've been doing all my spreadsheet regex work using R/RStudio until now. The regex feature alone could save me tons of hours in my consulting job.

galen211 | 9 years ago | on: Coinbase and the IRS

fwiw, Coinbase wouldn't be the first financial institution to challenge a John Doe Summons. The IRS issued one to UBS in 2008 (https://www.justice.gov/archive/tax/txdv08584.htm). UBS claimed it couldn't comply with the summons without breaking Swiss bank secrecy law, and the Dept of Justice ultimately came to an agreement directly with the Swiss government (under an existing tax treaty) to get the records it was seeking. Simultaneously, the IRS set up a voluntary disclosure program for Americans to pay a penalty on back taxes and avoid criminal prosecution. The amount of back taxes owed on bitcoin capital gains is probably less than the amount being sheltered by the Swiss in 2008, but it's not nothing.

galen211 | 10 years ago | on: JEugene (YC S15) Detects Errors in Legal Documents, Saving Time and Money

I gave the tool a try on a document I'm drafting for review by our lawyer. It's pretty interesting and I can definitely see it saving some time. I'm curious though, aren't there any word processing applications built specifically for lawyers that solve this problem? It always amazes me how poor the functionality of Word for legal documents is.

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Direct Match (YC W15) Aims to Make Bond Trading as Easy as Stock Trading

Sure - if you own a bond maturing in 10yrs and paying a coupon of 2% yearly, what you have is a series of cash flows of 2 2 2 2 2 ... 102. In other words, a treasury bond can be decomposed into a series of zero coupon cash flows (interest payments+principal re-payment). The price of a 'whole bond' is the sum of the prices of the different zero coupon cash flows.

A bond maturing in 30yrs has at least 10yrs of cash flows that line up with the 10yr bond. Since coupon interest payments can be 'stripped' from one bond and 'reconstituted' in another bond through the federal reserve, the price of matched-maturity zero coupon cash flows, even if they are stripped from different bonds, is the same. If they weren't, there would be an arbitrage opportunity to buy the cash flows of one bond and sell the cash flows of another bond, exchange them at the Fed, and lock in an immediate profit. Sometimes arbitrage opportunities like this do exist, but typically it's due to liquidity events where it becomes impossible finance offsetting positions. There's a good article on this called "Notes on Bonds: Liquidity at all Costs in the Great Recession" by Musto, Nini, and Schwarz

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Direct Match (YC W15) Aims to Make Bond Trading as Easy as Stock Trading

Thanks - we chose Treasuries because it's a highly liquid market, and the bonds are easy to value. Even large trades can't move prices by that much since the cash flows of Treasuries are fungible. Also, the current electronic systems for trading aren't necessarily good at accommodating large trades from institutional investors. The entire risk of the trade is owned by one market-maker. If trading platforms could facilitate one-to-many counterparty transactions, the market would be able to price large trades more competitively. Moreover, institutional investors could split up large trades into smaller executions without disclosing their identity to a principal market-maker. That might be more advantageous than executing a single block.

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Direct Match (YC W15) Aims to Make Bond Trading as Easy as Stock Trading

Diversification. Also, even if investors don't buy bonds, prices in the bond market still affect them. Treasuries represent the price of 'cash in the future' since they are risk-free assets. Everything from mortgage rates to the cost of credit for companies is fundamentally dependent on price discovery in the Treasuries market.

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Direct Match (YC W15) Aims to Make Bond Trading as Easy as Stock Trading

HFT firms can only access on-the-run trading currently. That doesn't mean the bank is responsible for all the liquidity in off-the-runs. It's just highly inefficient that intermediation has to occur via the swapbox, which isn't accessible to electronic market makers. There are plenty of relative value hedge funds that would take the other side of buy-side flows, if they had access to a market where they could show their trading intentions anonymously.

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Direct Match (YC W15) Aims to Make Bond Trading as Easy as Stock Trading

The problem is that the market has been skewed by banks, which set-up the existing electronic platforms in the 1990's. The electronic trading protocols were designed to be exactly like a telephone conversation between the bank and its customer. By restricting who can 'listen' to the conversation, banks create a private information loop, where the largest banks with the most customers can capture more of the information in the market than other participants. Effectively, this advantage over the market means that investors have been subsidizing billions of dollars a year in bank profits for years.

galen211 | 11 years ago | on: Flash Boys in the US Treasury Market

So bottom line, the people paid millions of dollars per year by banks to understand the market have to ask IT for an explanation of the market? Hmmm...
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