> I’ve found it very useful but it took a fair amount of time to build up the set of tricks to doing things right.
What kind of tricks are you thinking of?
> I wonder if Matlab being most hated relates to people being forced to learn it in undergrad and it being poorly taught etc.
To me, as someone who has used Matlab fairly extensively both being taught in undergrad and in programming-centric grad research, Matlab's one and only strength is in its being a one-and-done IDE/programming language. If you're using Matlab, then you're using it in an IDE that "just works" and was installed and configured simultaneously with Matlab itself: there's no real distinction between the two. Further (assuming you check the right boxes during installation [1]), all the possible packages you could ever have [2] are installed at the same time. So you get a super simple install and never have to think about installing or configuring anything ever again. I don't want to minimize how useful this is. Every other programming language I've ever used has had a huge amount of installation and configuration overhead, often an insurmountable barrier for non-programmers (e.g. scientists).
That said, I dread using Matlab, for many, many reasons. My top three reasons in no particular order: 1. you can only really define one function per same-named file, 2. errors are almost always one line long (no stack trace) and rarely give a line number in normal usage, 3. cell arrays. Cell arrays are basically just untyped lists, yet somehow mind-bendingly confusing to use.
[1] assuming you paid for the right to check those boxes. If anyone is wondering, to get all the boxes in a non-personal context would cost 100x more than whatever you're thinking (which is a bit of a straw man since no single person needs all the packages and institutions get crazy bundle deals). I haven't taken the time to add it all up, but base MATLAB is $900/year/computer, and each of the ~100 packages costs $500-2000/year/computer (skewing heavily to $500). So, roughly $50k/year/computer for everything. Which is silly, obviously. Most people only want a handful of packages so realistically it's only about $2-4k/year/computer. Only. However! If you just want it for non-commercial, non-academic, non-governmental use, you can buy Matlab for only $149 + $45p, where p is the number of packages you want.
[2] Literally, all the packages you can have. Package development is 98% limited to Mathworks-official packages.
Yea I would say the main set of tricks related to using cells, working with large text files, and working with things like meshgrid as a few examples. Super easy to get confused even with good documentation and examples. Matlab benefits from the various people who work at mathworks who fix things and communicate with customers when you find odd issues.
> I don't understand why we don't just teach JS or TS as a starting language.
IMO the main problem is pedagogical. JS is a vast sea of conveniences that contradict conventional programming practices. This is also the reason I hesitate to recommend R as a starting language, for all that it's the de facto language of statistical analysis. Both languages are hard to teach in a coherent way, because both have lots of gotchas and exceptions that aren't bad, per se, but in the aggregate impede understanding of fundamentals.
Just yesterday I was working with someone on fundamentals in R, distinguishing between literals, variables, and functions. He got the idea, and then we got to model specification (`lm(y ~ x)`) and I had to shrug and say, those "identifiers" are different. I shudder to think of trying to teach types with a beginning student in JS.
"Researchers concluded that more than 266,000 cases were tied to the event attended by more than 460,000 individuals.
[...]
At least 260 cases in 11 states have been officially connected to the rally by government officials.
[...]
Most people who attended the event did not take coronavirus precautions like wearing masks and social distancing, The Associated Press reported at the time."
I am trying to parse that first blurb “tied to the event”. Are they saying that of the 460k that went to the event, 260k of them are somehow associated with a coronavirus case? It’s not really clear what “tied to” means in the article at least.
That quite a leap. Even ignoring other potentially beneficial jobs, do you really think that modern supply chains ("support roles of transportation” of food) can function without the internet?
Could you recommend any resource for gaining that understanding of options? Not just technically, but in terms of the strategies you've sketched here (obviously I can and have googled the definitions).
> Could you recommend any resource for gaining that understanding of options?
The Options Clearing Corporation [1] actually has a solid set of introductory courses [2]. That said, I am very conservative about when I believe individual investors should be trading options. (With surplus investment capital, i.e. after tax-advantaged retirement accounts and liquidity reserves have been maxed out, and principally for purposes of hedging (versus leverage).
Well, retirement accounts are certainly awesome, but there should be an investment account for your 5-year to 20-year planned events.
Between weddings, funerals, car purchases, home purchases, major home renovations (new roof, new windows, etc. etc.), there are a lot of things that can be planned for 5 to 15 years out that probably should be properly invested. These lengths are long enough that sitting on cash is probably a bad idea, short enough that you need it before you can crack your retirement accounts.
Some of those things can be paid from your 401k or Roth IRA, but its a bad idea IMO to draw from your tax-advantaged retirement accounts in these cases.
A real world example: if you are beginning to look for a house and will likely need $70k+ for a good down payment, that would be the time to buy put-options to "lock in" your $70k.
You haven't found a house yet, but within 6 months or so, you'll likely need the money.
Without options, you'd basically be forced to sell your stocks ASAP, in case the market crashes and ruins your plans. But with a put-option, you negate all the downside risks, while retaining the ability to collect dividends and benefit from upward swings of the market. The put options allows you to confidently hold the stocks up until the week before closing (You'll still need time to transfer the money and generate a cashier's check, but you won't have to worry about market fluctuations)
There are 4-kinds of fundamental option trades (long call, long put, short call, short put). And virtually any combinations up to groups to four legs can become a legitimate strategy. (Ex: Long Call + Short call can be a bull-spread, or a bear-spread, depending on what strikes you did it at). Wikipedia's Option Strategies page is a decent start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Options_strategy
For more "in depth" into some basic, conservative strategies, I suggest "The Rookie's Guide to Options", which is the book that I personally used to learn this stuff.
Its probably better to become intimately familiar with the "basic trades" (long call, short call, long put, and short put). Because at the end of the day, the more complicated strategies are just those four trades combined together.
One tidbit of "algebra" is to remember that "Long Call + Short Put == Virtual Stock". Sometimes written as Call - Put == Share. This formula really helps to break down the more complicated strategies (ie: Iron Condor which has 4 legs). It also helps you determine which strategies are roughly equivalent. (IE: Owning a share and selling a call == Share - Call is roughly equal to selling a put without owning a share.)
The Black Scholes model, aka "The Greeks", also seems important from a theoretical point of view. I've talked to some financial professionals and the pros consider Black-Scholes to be overly simplistic... but its still a model... and you need to have some basis to reality for why options have different prices. So know the model AND know the inherent weaknesses of the model (Volatility smiles and whatnot)
-------------------
One last tidbit: if you are going to trade options, be sure to find a brokerage which trades multiple legs in a single unit. You don't want to pay commission on every single leg of each option strategy.
E-Trade for instance allows you to straight up buy an Iron Condor on one commission.
What kind of tricks are you thinking of?
> I wonder if Matlab being most hated relates to people being forced to learn it in undergrad and it being poorly taught etc.
To me, as someone who has used Matlab fairly extensively both being taught in undergrad and in programming-centric grad research, Matlab's one and only strength is in its being a one-and-done IDE/programming language. If you're using Matlab, then you're using it in an IDE that "just works" and was installed and configured simultaneously with Matlab itself: there's no real distinction between the two. Further (assuming you check the right boxes during installation [1]), all the possible packages you could ever have [2] are installed at the same time. So you get a super simple install and never have to think about installing or configuring anything ever again. I don't want to minimize how useful this is. Every other programming language I've ever used has had a huge amount of installation and configuration overhead, often an insurmountable barrier for non-programmers (e.g. scientists).
That said, I dread using Matlab, for many, many reasons. My top three reasons in no particular order: 1. you can only really define one function per same-named file, 2. errors are almost always one line long (no stack trace) and rarely give a line number in normal usage, 3. cell arrays. Cell arrays are basically just untyped lists, yet somehow mind-bendingly confusing to use.
[1] assuming you paid for the right to check those boxes. If anyone is wondering, to get all the boxes in a non-personal context would cost 100x more than whatever you're thinking (which is a bit of a straw man since no single person needs all the packages and institutions get crazy bundle deals). I haven't taken the time to add it all up, but base MATLAB is $900/year/computer, and each of the ~100 packages costs $500-2000/year/computer (skewing heavily to $500). So, roughly $50k/year/computer for everything. Which is silly, obviously. Most people only want a handful of packages so realistically it's only about $2-4k/year/computer. Only. However! If you just want it for non-commercial, non-academic, non-governmental use, you can buy Matlab for only $149 + $45p, where p is the number of packages you want.
[2] Literally, all the packages you can have. Package development is 98% limited to Mathworks-official packages.