Announcements, thanks and promises

    Well, firstly, let me thank you to all those who read my articles on this blog, commented, gave their suggestions - I was very pleased to understand that this topic seems important to me not one (and not a bit boring , because in everything you can find your interesting points!). I received a lot of comments and ideas, questions that I tried to answer ... unfortunately, I couldn’t answer all and not all - sometimes because the answer is a separate article, and sometimes simply because I don’t know the topic of the question so much as to try to answer it.

    And I wanted to write this post for a long time. In addition to the actual informative part (under the cut - announcements of future articles), it will also contain a certain amount of thought. Reflections on the topic: but think it over, habralyudi, how long has Habr ceased to be a purely geek resource of a strictly technical orientation?


    After a long time, n'est ce pas? And I cannot but welcome this - even at the risk of being bombarded: because now Habr is something more - Habr is a community of smart people. No more and no less. Think about it.

    This thought warms me, warms me and the understanding that this is how it should be: there is an intelligentsia of a humanitarian nature, and there is a technical one; so long ago it was already in Russia and not only, and this is highly correct. And an educated person, in addition to his piece (well, do you remember what a narrow specialist is like?), Knows how to search for information, knows how to apply it, is ready to learn something new, and always tries to understand what is happening around him - even if (and especially if) it is not his focus. In my understanding, this is what a real engineer should be.

    However, enough philosophy. To business!

    So, the following topics are on our agenda. We have already considered, as a first approximation, one of the basic financial instruments - stocks. Without a doubt, he is only one of - but still one of the most important. Next I suggest:
    1. Discuss other types of financial instruments, make a small comparison with the stocks we have already studied. We will classify other financial instruments as bonds (bonds), which we will discuss rather briefly - and derivatives (futures and options in the first place), which we will dwell on in more detail, because they are often the most difficult for an untrained person to understand. We will not touch FX (foreign exchange) and commodities (for example, oil), since this is a separate issue. An understanding of this material is necessary if only to understand why “the stock market is not alive by shares”. By the way, the notorious crisis has nothing to do with stocks - and in many respects it relates to operations with derivatives :-)
    2. Consider the types of stock indices - primarily the Dow-Jones Industrial Average and FTSE 100 - as the two main indices of the two largest world exchanges (NYSE and LSE). It is proposed to consider the principle of index formation, the nature of changes in its value, and some small example of how a change in the stock price of a company that is included in the index can affect its value. However, if people ask for the NASDAQ Composite or RTS or MICEX indices, I see no reason to refuse.
    3. Finally, the most interesting thing is what I have long wanted to get to, exactly where computers and IT infrastructure appear in full growth - the actual bidding (and, in particular, algorithmic trading - at least in the first approximation). I would very much like to talk about at least a couple of electronic trading strategies, and if possible, about order execution, straight-through-processing (STP) and direct market access, these are all very interesting, albeit rather complicated topics, since there will be a lot of them branches in the field that we did not consider; almost certainly this article will have to be split into several topics
    What do you think? I have not started writing new articles yet - I decided to take a short break, at the same time giving you the opportunity to "digest" the material already written and published. This is to say that if there is something incredibly interesting - then write comments or plus existing ones, if enough people are gathered - we will change the list. So - everything is in your hands!

    PS for those who have never read a single article:

    Stocks, part one
    Stocks, part two

    At the very beginning of the Finance for everyone blog there is an article - a comparative analysis of Google and Yahoo! Finance, but it is a little out of our educational cycle.

    Also popular now: