I am the very model of a
@Placeholder
Best posts made by Placeholder
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RE: ⏱ You know you've been spending too much time on TDWTF when...
That moment when you realize that you started calling the plastic creeper sitting on your desk @Keith.
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RE: 'Clean your desk' -- Interviews at Amazon
@dcon said in 'Clean your desk' -- Interviews at Amazon:
Jesus. Installing software where the proctor then goes in and messes with system settings? Oh FUCK NO. NO ONE gets remote access to my machine.
Seriously, if I started an interview like that, I'd be "I'm sorry. If this is how you do interviews, I can't work for you. Thank you. Click."
update: finished reading, saw he finally gave the
I interviewed with a different company last year that had an interview process similar to this. After discovering that said company had showed up on the front page several times, I decided that I was never going to work for them. However, I kept going just to get some practice...
... until I got to right before this stage of the interview. There was absolutely no chance that I was going to give somebody that much access to my computer. I gave them the polite equivalent of the and ran away screaming.
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
I've managed to write the following (incorrect) formula for calculating the average of two numbers multiple different times now without noticing the typo until much later:
var averageX = (x2 - x1) / 2;
A big part of the problem is that
x1
is quite frequently a small number close to zero. Half the time, the results are close enough to correct that I don't notice. Half the time, the results are very, very wrong. Both times this has happened, it has taken an embarrassing amount of time to track the issue down to this little typo. -
RE: Whom should I write in?
@boomzilla said in Whom should I write in?:
Let's put the TDWTF trolling brain to work for something that won't actually mean something but might amuse someone who could not even conceive of TDWTF!
Are you still waiting for your perfect candidate?
Don't want somebody else to screw things up before you can vote that person into office?
Vote for the only candidate who would dare leave things the way they are until someone more qualified for the job comes around
Vote @Placeholder 2016
As your congressman, I promise to not let your constituency slide further into the hands of the other guys. My Prevent Bad Change By Preventing All Change policies will keep your lands safe until you can finally locate the candidate of your dreams and convince them they have what it takes to run for office. Sleep soundly at night knowing that, hey, at the very least things won't be getting any worse.
Vote for sanity. Vote for a more qualified candidate for tomorrow. Vote for @Placeholder.
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@dcoder said in A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted:
A fitting companion to the previous post, a looooong list of coins that have already flamed out:
Displaying 1 - 50 of 830
It's 843 now. That's 13 dead cryptocurrencies in about 5 days, or one dead every 9 hours, 14 minutes, approximately.
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RE: WTF Bites
It took me several reset attempts to figure out what the real problem was. Switched to a dumb, lower quality password and was able to log in right away.
Latest posts made by Placeholder
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RE: A fool and his not-really-money are soon parted
@error Right click them, copy them, and paste them into this thread so we can explain them to you
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RE: In other news today...
@izzion said in In other news today...:
Put Options are contracts, so that up until X date you have the option to sell the stock at the specified price
@izzion said in In other news today...:
If the value of the stock drops below the strike price (the contracted price you can sell at by exercising the contract), you can make the difference between the market price of the stock and the strike price of the option
@izzion said in In other news today...:
Or you’re using the options to hedge a position (you own the stock at $100 and you buy a put option at $80 to make sure you can’t lose more than $20 per share, but you pay a small price for that insurance)
Here's a example of how put options work:
- A while back, I bought 1000 shares of a stock with some fun money, for fun, because I thought I might be able to turn a decent profit off of it. I paid a price of $2.86 per share, meaning I spent $2860 dollars.
The price of the stock went up to around $3.30. Meaning, if I sold everything I would have turned a profit of $440, or a gain of about 15%. Not a bad gain, right? No, that wasn't good enough for me. I wanted more. However, at this point I was concerned that maybe something would happen that would cause the value of the stock to drop a lot. At this point, I decided to take some steps to protect myself in the event that the stock price dropped.
- I bought 10 put option contracts for a strike price of $3.00 that expire on May 17, 2024. Each contract cost me $0.55 per share, which comes out to $55 per contract (because contracts are typically for 100 shares). Since I bought 10 of them, I paid $550.
This purchase gave me the right, but not the obligation, to sell my shares for a price of $3.00 per share at any point up until May 17. Because these are American-style put options, I can call up my broker at any time and "exercise" my right to sell my shares for that price. In theory, I could do this even if the price of the stock was higher but that would be a phenomenally stupid thing to do. The value here is that even if the price of the stock is lower than $3 I can still do this.
If you crunch the numbers, that means I spent $2,860 on shares and $550 on put options. I have now spent $3,410 on shares that at the time were only worth $3300. In the event that the stock fell below $3, I would be able to use my put options to sell my shares for a total of $3000, meaning the worst that could ever happen is that I lose a total of $410. If the stock is less than $3.41 per share I am guaranteed to lose money, even though I only spent $2.86 per share.
That's a really expensive insurance policy, even for fun money. Should I have sold the shares right then and there for a decent profit? No, I'm a greedy bastard, dammit. I thought this stock could go even higher and I didn't want to miss out on all the potential profits. Buy put options at a higher strike price, meaning I could sell the shares for more? No, puts at a higher strike price cost even more money. Buy put options at a lower strike price instead? No, because the insurance is cheaper for a reason. I would lose even more money if the price of the stock tanked. Instead, I did this:
- Sold 10 call option contracts for a strike price of $4.50 also expiring May 17, 2024. Received a credit of $0.41 per share, meaning I gained $410 dollars.
When I buy a call option I gain the right, but not the obligation, to purchase 100 shares of a stock at the strike price of the contract. This is a great deal for me if the stock goes up above the strike price of the contract. I could make a metric ton of money if I'm correct. This is why people love to gamble with options contracts.
You'll note that I sold the contracts, instead of buying them. That means I gave somebody else the right, but not the obligation, to buy my shares from me at a price of $4.50 per share. If the price of the stock were below $4.50 then they would have to be incredibly stupid to exercise those call options. I'd happily sell them the shares if they did that though. If the price is above $4.50 then they get to be the ones making all the profit while I miss out because I sold my shares to them at $4.50 instead of at a higher price.
Let's crunch the numbers again. I spent $2860 on shares, $550 on put options and I got paid $410 for selling some call options on my shares. In total, I'm out $3000. My put options let me sell my shares for a total of $3000 if I want, meaning I can get all my money back no matter what the stock does. However, if the price of the stock goes above $4.50 I will have somebody else call my shares away from me at $4.50, no matter how high the price of the stock goes. In other words, I traded away any profit above $1,500 in order to not lose any money no matter what.
Here's a pretty graph describing my profits and losses, as it would look like in May when all the options contracts expire:
I posted about this strategy not too long ago in another thread, as a way of illustrating how you can use options contracts to do things other than high-risk gambling. Since then, news came out that caused the price of the stock to go down. A lot. It's trading at $1.77 now.
- If I had sold all my shares instead of engaging in this financial nonsense, I would have profited by $440.
- If I had not made my options contracts trades, I would have shares worth $1,770 now. I would have lost
$1,090. - If I had only bought put options, my shares would still be only worth $1,770 but my puts would be worth $1,340. I spent $550 on those puts, so my net is $2,560. I lost
$300. - What I did was sell those call options on top of everything else. I sold them for $410 and they are currently worth $40 meaning I would have to spend that much to buy them back to close my position. My net is positive $70.
If the stock stays the same price all the way until May I will exercise my put options and keep all the credit I got from selling call options, and still lose money in net because my brokerage charged commissions for my options contract trades. In other words, I played with options contracts in a "semi-intelligent" way and still managed to lose most of my profits. However, I was able to use options contracts to define and control my risk. The risk management was worth the cost. That's why options contracts are useful.
TL:DR: Don't even bother thinking about trading options if you skipped over this wall of text. Just don't. There are several more topics I didn't even hint at in this post that affected my decision making process.
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RE: In other news today...
@topspin said in In other news today...:
I need to learn how Put Options work ASAP.
Here's how put options work:
- You get seriously offended that a stock's price is continuously going up, or could possibly go up when you don't want it to.
- You throw some money at a mysterious third party in the hopes that the stock goes down and they sell you put options in return for your money
- The stock doesn't go down and your puts lose all of their value. Alternatively, you paid such a high premium for your put options that you still lose money even if the stock goes down a lot.
More seriously, IPOs don't typically get options chains right away, so the only safe way to profit off of them is to be one of the lucky few that gets issued shares ahead of the IPO, selling the stock immediately when you get the option to (many times there are restrictions on this). Otherwise, you have to short sell the stock which carries its own risks (especially since you can't buy call options to hedge your short position). If options are available then you should seriously consider using options spreads instead to control more precisely how much risk you're taking on.
In contrast, if you spend your money on instead you can stay on the sidelines, watch everybody else lose their money, and then you at least still have your . For a little while. The theta decay on popped popcorn kernels is vicious.
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RE: I, ChatGPT
There are plenty of examples of machine learning models gaming the systems that humans create for them
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RE: I, ChatGPT
@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
This is going to add a whole new dimension to the copyright infringement discussion
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@izzion There are some uses for options beyond rampant speculation. I'm currently using the collar strategy for my one and only fun money stock position. I was up a bit (out of sheer luck, I admit) and I had reason to believe that it could keep going up (which has happened before), but I was concerned that the price of the stock might suddenly drop (which has happened before). Using the collar strategy, I am effectively giving up all the profit above a certain point if the stock goes up a lot in exchange for being protected if the stock goes down a lot.
This is great, because the stock proceeded to go down a lot. I would have kept more of my gains if I had just sold everything, but using an options strategy in a non-speculative way allowed me to keep a small amount of the profit I already made no matter what and I still have the potential to make more money if the stock reverses course and starts going back up again.
Admittedly, I did have to lose some fun money on speculative options positions first before realizing that they can be used for more than degenerate gambling.
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@topspin said in Things that remind you of WDTWTF members:
I keep wondering if I could make some money if I understood that
Understanding how the Black-Scholes formula helps you understand approximately how the price of a European-style options contract changed when the underlying conditions changed. That is not the same thing as understanding how to make money using options contracts. You'll understand how you lost/gained money but not why.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 13? And nothing else
Microsoft is going to change their OS numbering scheme long before they get to this release. This thread will get reused for a totally unrelated topic by someone unwilling to pay the new thread tax.
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RE: I, ChatGPT
We should ask the AI itself what it thinks about its alleged violation of copyright. I'm sure this will clear everything up.
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RE: WTF is happening with Windows 11? And nothing else
I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I had enabled the "automatically hide the taskbar" setting, mainly because that's what I normally do and because the taskbar seemed to be hiding itself properly.
One day, the taskbar showed up again and refused to hide itself. I assumed for a while it was because a program was keeping it activated. After some investigation, that turned out not to be the case. The auto-hide setting was in fact turned off. I opted not to turn the setting on because it I don't really care about the taskbar.
Today, the taskbar has disappeared again. Moving the mouse down to the bottom of the screen doesn't make the taskbar appear. Pressing the Windows key does make it appear though. Checking my settings again while writing this post, I can see that the auto-hide setting is turned on. In addition, using the mouse to make the taskbar visible works again.
Either I'm crazy, Windows 11 is crazy, Microsoft is gaslighting me, or Windows 11 is just a with a dubious veneer painted over it. Or it's all four things at once.