Sam Walton - Quotes

Commit to your business
Share your profits
Motivate your partners
Communicate with your employees
Appreciate
Celebrate your success
Listen to all in your company and customers
Exceed your customer's expectations
Control your expenditure better than your competition
Ignore the conventional wisdom to think out of the traditional

Andrew Carnegie - The road to business

A man who wants to go ahead must go beyond the range of his special department. He must attract attention.

There will always be boon in brains. So cultivate that crop, for if you grow any amout of that commodity, here is your best market and you can't overstock it. The more brains you have to sell the higher price you can demand.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket is all wrong. I tell you to put all your eggs in one basket but never lose sight of that basket.


Edison

The brain that isn't used rusts. The brain that is used responds.

The man who does not make up his mind to cultivate the habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life.

An executive is a master of his time. He systemizes his minutes.



J.C.Penny



Unorganized work without an eye on the goal is generally futile


Leadership is a quality that transforms a group of people into a team.

Nothings leads as well as example.

Great leaders always take responsibility. They never pass the buck. They are the ones it stops at.


Ben Franklin

A sleeping fox catches no poultry

Diligence is the mother of good luck

Plough deep while the lazy sleep and you shall have corn to sell and keep.

Drive your business and let it not drive you

Be ashamed to catch yourself idle

if we are industrious we shall never starve, for hunger looks at a working man's house but dares not enter.

The second vice is to lie, the first one is to run on debt.

A borrower is a slave to the lender

John L. Mc Caffrey - The Book of Management Wisdom Quotes

The mechanics of running a business is not very complicated when you get down to essentials. You have to make some stuff and sell it to someone for more than it cost you. That is all there is to it....except of course a few million other details.

As a president you will learn to sorrow that, while a computer never sulks and an algorithm is never gets jealous of another algorithm, the same can't be said about humans.

Words of Wisdom - Part II Quotes

Alfred P. Sloan Jr - The Book of Management Wisdom

Every executive has to recognize that he himself cannot do everything that needs to get done. Until he recognizes that, he is only an individual with individual's power, but after he recognizes that, he becomes, for the first time, an executive, with multiple powers.


One important thing to know about managing is to make men think and act with individual zeal and initiative, yet co-operating with each other.

We have to choose between two types of organizations - Co-ordinated or Consolidated.
In the former policies are made at the top and orders are issues down. In the other, management comes from the bottom up and arouses individual initiative.


The policies in any business must come from the people who are involved with the problem daily and who need to get the things done to overcome that problem.


Almost everything possible in an organization starts from the bottom. That is where it is and will be carried out. Hence it will be carried out sooner if innovation starts there.


The job of a leader is not to formulate all the decisions, but to provide a channel for letting ideas arise out of a day's work.

Of all the business activities, 99% are routine. They do not require management hand holding except in the aggregate.



You will soon realize that problems change rapidly, techniques and products can be transformed; but unfortunately, people change very slowly if at all.


Dr. Brett has these words of wisdom for us.....

Will Power is like a muscle. The more you use it the stronger it gets.

To Change your life change your habits

You can learn a lot just by observing

If you cant figure out your purpose figure out your passion;for your passion will lead you right into your purpose.

Men move mountains by first chipping away and carrying small stones.

Comparison of Quant Finance Languages

Python is good for quick prototyping and being a general purpose "glue" languge.
NumPy, SciPy, and extensions to other languages (eg C++) and packages (eg R, via RPy
Python 3.0 is not backward compatible with previous versions, as well as (I am told) these nice libraries like NumPy and SciPy. Publicly available libraries are a big plus, given that nothing (reliable) like this really exists in C++, with the possible exception of GSL for C.

Python doesn't have a built-in graphics, so one should use GNUPlot interface or Rpy, which are less convenient than Matlab or R graphics. There is a great package called matplotlib that basically ports all the 2D Matlab ploting functions with virtually verbatim syntax to Python. 3D plots like mesh and surf are not available at the moment (to my knowledge).

I think Python's biggest drawback is its Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). Not only is it confusing and unintuitive, if used incorrectly it virtually limits pure Python codes to be single threads. Of course as Joseph mentioned, you can interface Python with C++ very easily and have your parrallelizable computation code written in C++ with a Python wrapper. Doing so is pretty easy with SWIG and I think there are a few other ways out there as well (I recently stumbled upon a Boost library for doing so and it seems extremely well done and easy, but I have no experience with it)

Python supports multi-threading quite nicely. However, there is a significant issue related to multi-core support. The GIL (global lock) mentioned above effectively limits current versions of Python (including 3.0) to operating on one core at a time. Threads can share that core, but you can't have two python threads from the same process actively executing python code in true parallel fashion.

There are are several options for integrating Python and C++ code, and they can (with care) fully support python's native threading model. C++ routines called from python can also (with even more care) exempt themselves from the restricted parallel model by releasing the GIL and reacquiring it prior to returning to python. This allows a process running python to successfully orchestrate some serious, truly parallel number crunching implemented in C++. Only one core will be interpreting Python code at a time, but python threads running nested C++ calls can use any core available to the process.


There are a lot of packages that let you interface between python and C++ so what ends up happening is that you can use python to stick together components that are written in C++. I also find the QT wrapper for Python (PyQT) extremely useful and allows for all the advantages of QT and all the advantages of Python.


Some of my opinionated comments, and understand I am not a hard core coder:

-Perl is too esoteric for me
-Python is more similar to Ruby, but don't tell Ruby folks that
-If you hate indented white spaces, you will hate Python
-Sure, I use Python since I am lazy to use CINT
-Octave is fine, but NumPy and matplolib is fast 'enough' for me, YMMV
-Nice GUI's via matplotlib, chaco, MayaVI via Enthought
-I like Python since I can easily code, operating system agnostic
-Python is a good first OO computer language to learn
-Python is not the panacea, but one of many paths to pursue
-Don't use Python 3.0 yet.
-I'd be interested in hearing others using Python in Finance

A general but sad cycle for me:
1. Protoype in Python
2. Recode in C# naively not using any specialized .NET libraries
3. Look in shock at how big in size the C# code source is
4. Archive the C# code somewhere
5. Go back full time to the Python code
6. Hear from a friend on why I did not use XX .NET library a year later
7. Cannot figure out the old C# code since my documentation sucks
8. Continue to use the Python code.



Perl doesn't have Matlab's numerical capabilities. Perl isn't nearly as easy to interface with compiled code, has a much less clean synttax, and worst of all, the perl language community went crazy and has been bogged down trying to create perl6 for the last few years and basically getting nowhere.


I use Matlab for regression analysis, portfolio optimization, and low frequency trading models. Matlab has some superior functionalities. Get Octave if you don't have a Matlab license. There's QTOctave too if you need a graphical interface. Doesn't have a PDE solver like Matlab, but hey, there's your first project ;)


R project as a good and free analytic tool for prototype.