Posts by Dominic (The Pimp) Connor

The writer yet again...

Andus, I never said I controlled your life, I said I could screw with it.

As it happens I am a Brit, in fact I don't say I am good at my job, merely that the position enables me to do bad things, if I wanted to.

That is a far from unique position of course, between you and a job, there are several people like headhunters, HR, etc. Several people seem to want us to use this power of veto to "improve" society, and since you clearly are not a fan of mine, I hope you will agree that you will agree with the idea that I shouldn't use it much.

More responses from the author

A few % of the CVs I read mention some religious activity as part of "Interests", and I usually don't care, except for few who I counsel that the "Interests" section is so large it questions your commitment to work, though this happens more often with sport than religion.

My own name is highly religious and often Irish, and I recall some trade unionists getting upset about me taking "British" jobs.

I see French as a bit like learning MS Access. Useful occasionally, but very few people get any sort of decent job by knowing it and nothing else. But in many ways French is like Java, so many people get taught it, than the career value is severely degraded. 95% of the world is not Francophone, but 95% of British kids get taught it.

I get accused of pigeon holing people

Yep, that's my job.

The race of "evil people" is not specified because I don't use identifiable names in my public career writings, except for IBM HR of course.

Yes, HR people often make sure there is nothing "bad" in a CV, but some do not.

Also, the majority of CVs we send in go directly to managers, some are copied to HR, but as you can imagine, my job is to get the CV to the right target. So HR filters are not a guarantee.

There is no excuse for incorrect spelling or grammar on a CV. None. About 1/3 of the people we deal with aren't native English speakers, and we are actually harsher on them. That's because it is better to get a note from me saying "fix the spelling" than to be seen as sloppy.

The writer responds

I did have one well known figure in banking ask me if my firm could filter out people who believed in Creationism...

I flatly refused, even though my contempt for such people is so great that I use "Creationist" in casual speech as a term of abuse when I see something as stupidly dishonest.

I serve a higher ethic in my work, I do it for the money.

The discipline here is that I have a certain power over people's lives. If I don't send your application on to the employer you don't get the job, with absolute certainty, regardless of your ability.

The effect of that can be pretty large, and for those who say I should exercise my power to some social purpose should ask themselves "Do I want Dominic to use this power against me" ?

Statistically, a reader of this piece may hold political views I dislike, or come from a country that has done something bad to mine, or belong to an ethnic or religious group that has done something bad. You may smoke, a habit I regard with utter contempt, or eat eggs, the smell of which makes me feel sick.

You may wear clothing that covers you more than I find "normal", or you may wear less, want me to act on that against you ?

I can fuck with your career.

I have a *huge* database of decision makers in banks, and can whisper in their ears.

You want me use that power against "bad" people, you had better check you're not someone I think is bad.

Probably an improvement

Having run a reasonable sized network over Clot, I welcome this move.

Firstly out of spite, since I personally hate the staff at Colt, and a bunch of them losing their jobs is something I'd like to see.

To quote their former CEO when I asked him why they had screwed up a minor s/w fix so badly that several banks had fallen off the network, "some teenagers are actually quite good".

I'd been angry that they had failed to carry out simple tasks yet again, and had asked why they were using teenagers to do jobs meant for grownups. Even though by this point we had someone whose fulltime job was hassling Colt to do what we paid them for, I hadn't really thought that they were using children, but I learned that in the name of cost saving there is nothing so recklessly stupid that Colt won't do it.

I'd rather talk to a Spaniard who had no English than any of the dimwits that Colt UK has in support.

I am no fan of BT, but once when they'd also screwed up, the account exec did at least say "but at least we're not Colt". When BT use your pathetically incompetent staff to prove they are not the worst comms supplier to deal with, you know you're dealing with Colt.

We also could never even get them to bill us properly either.

Using shorter words

As it happens I *do* have a Bronze Swimming Cert :)

"Evil Consultant" shows an understanding of risk so limited, I assume he works for the FSA ?

I was describing strategies where going short and long were mixed for more efficient risk taking.

In any case, the fact that the worst case scenario in one strategy is higher than in another, misses the point big time. The *PROBABILITY* of the nightmare scenario is important as well, as is one's ability to get out of it as it begins to go tits up.

Prices can indeed bounce up, and it Evil Consultant had actually got as far as reading the title of the piece, he would have seen "Bear Squeeze", where the horrors of a naked short position knock on your door.

The author repsonds

Yes, I think a DR site should cope with s/w bugs. The "D" in DR stands for "Disaster", be that s/w, h/w, fire, flood or hiring Accenture.

I apologize for not including everyone's favourite O/S in my list. I would have included them all, but it would have been boring. As it happens, I myself chose HP/UX. I suppose I'll get slagged for that as well. My *point* was that nothing is 100% trustworthy, it the quality of people and their management that makes it good enough, or not.

Since there was no IT on the board, we already have a major point of failure. Perhaps the new incumbent should learn to play golf so his better might meet him occasionally ?

As more than one person has said, systems that are life-critical often use the multiple version approach to allowing them to get past show stopper bugs quickly. I even know of bank systems where the version complied with debug code left in is the "hot" standby.

There's a tough judgment call on whether you fail over to a different version or not. But it ought to be available, no matter how much an accountant from the media thinks the money could better be spent on more auditors from his previous employer.

As for conflict of interest...

I think it is safe to assume that I will not be asked to find the replacement for whoever Ms. Furse offers up as a scapegoat. Yes, I know some people who could do the job, but frankly I can get more money sending them to a firm run by grown ups.

I like the conspiracy idea, and yes it does fit the facts worryingly well. The period where only certain firms could trade is particularly interesting to me. I'm not saying that anyone behaved improperly, but the traders on the sweet side of that are probably the happiest people in the City at the moment. No, that's not hard.

The FSE *ought* to investigate the LSE, and quite properly they won't comment. But let us not kid ourselves. The FSA does not have the ability to do this, and any "investigation" will have the objective of "restoring confidence". The report will talk of "lessons learned", and "new opportunities to move forward", since they would never dream of upsetting their golfing chums at the LSE.

I know what people at the FSA earn, and you can't get good people for that, indeed a former CEO of theirs went on the record to say so. They will get in PWC who will do a Hutton style report for them instead.

Let's saturate Phorm with rubbish

The first comment is my sentiment. Just for fun I've written a Javascript applet that generates a mix of real and randomly generated web access. I chose Javascript because I can't think of any way an ISP can easily tell the difference between a script in a browser navigating to a page, and me typing.

Anyone know something I don't ?

The write writes yet again...

>While I still think it is incorrect to slate CS grads who have been taught mainly Java,

Agreed, my gripe was CS grads who seem *only* to have been taught Java. If there existed a course where there was only C++ or only Lisp, I'd say the same.

>It's sad that CS is becomming so undervalued in the industry.

Agreed

>I'm sure we're not too far off the day when course CS101 is 'How to use MS Word'.

You're wrong.

We passed that some time ago. I find "CS" grads who boast of having done website design in pretty looking tools.

>CS grads will never be the answer for all programming jobs in every industry

Yes, but why ?

One would not have physics grads doing dentistry, so why are CS grads so unable to demonstrate superiority on their home ground ?

. We serve a purpose, and the skill of a recruitment consultant is to know what that purpose is. Generalising about the languages we learn is missing the point.

Anyway, how did an article on free MS tools become a rant by me on degree courses? :)

The author again

>"Like most recruitment agents the author has learned a few buzzwords, and read a few opinion pieces"

The author has debugged O/S code for IBM and MS, worked on the first Intel Unix, and earned good money coding. And although I agree you can teach O/S theory in Java, you can't do the practicals.

As for C#, I did not say it was great, partly because I don't think it is. I was observing there is commercial demand for it, as there is for Java.

I don't have a problem with Cs doing UIs, and don't really care whether it is 2% or 20% of the practical work. Most coursework is about the techniques and theory, and so UIs are as valid as databases or reading files.

UI is a fine place to teach OO, since of course a lot of that emerged from GUI research.

Same applies to lots of CS study, quicksort and the blackboard pattern are as valid in Java as C++. But my problem is kids only learning one language, which often leaves them with a very restricted view of the world.

I'm not anit-Java, I'm depressed reading the CVs of students who seem unable to get beyond it.

The author writes back....

More of my thoughts are at www.wilmott.com/blogs/dcfc

To Dave,

I did say that MS has a minority/declining market share at Uni, not that it was extinct. About 70% of the entry level CVs I read do not mention any MS technology at all. That's not say they don't use MS, but if I were MS that would scare me.

VB.NET is extremely rare, indeed I only used the qualified "almost unknown", because I assumed that I can't know everything.

I actually quite like VC++ as a teaching environment, indeed I have gone on record saying it's the best place to learn C++, YMMV.

Chris:

Some of the top employers agree about the value of engineering vs CS degrees. A stupid % of CS grads seem only to have done Java, no meaningful Lisp, Haskell, SQL, C++, Ruby, Perl, or anything that might make the poor dears think.

did you go to King's College ? Sounds that way, indeed I've helped some EEE people leave KCL, since I'm a headhunter.

We avoid even talking to KCL CS grads, it makes me sad.

Not a fan of the KCL course though, since the dimwits teach O/S internals in Java, just like the shambling morons who taught you.

RTOS is a fine component for a techie education.

You may reasonably say "who cares if an obscure journalist says my CS course is crap" ? I'm not famous as a journo, and am pathetically grateful to the Reg for letting me witter on :)

But I am *very* well known as a headhunter for banks, and that's easily the best paid destination for a smart developer. That's not just C++ of course, C# is also doing well for various reasons. Java is used for the dross end of banking work, and for the sort of work that is much the same at JP Morgan as at Tesco.

It's also exactly the kids of work that is most likely to be outsourced.

I've tried to get KCL to explain their "rationale" for teaching braind damaged shit to their kids, but my (surprisingly polite) emails were just ignored.

Gweihir, a question...

Gewhir could you tell me how you teach your students to deal with senior staff telling them to break elementary security ?

I assume you teach social engineering, but what about advocacy skills ?

Algotraders don't gloat

If my take on the market impact is right then it will have mostly ended up in the pockets of the algorithmic traders.

Not rich kids, smart kids

> but I am fed-up with the prices in the shops and my savings being effected by a >bunch of ill-educated, responsibility shy, rich kids.

Nearly all of my people have a masters on top of a degree in a real subject (physics, maths, engineering even some CS). A large % have PhDs, a small, but not trivial % have two PhDs.

Almost none inherited any wealth, certainly their current position is in no way inherited, which is rather different to politicians (Clintons, Kennedys, Bushes, even Benns)

>If they want to play, give them there own space but we need to insulate the real >world from all of this nonsense.

The allocation of resources is very real, and I trust them more. Middle class white kids like Peter Hain who committed the level of dishonesty he has demonstrated would disappear from a bank within femtoseconds of their discovery. Certainly wouldn't hang on for weeks.

And I emphasise the "white kid" part about Peter Hain, the most common name on my database is Mohammed. The current Labour cabinet has the same number of black or Moslem blokes on it as the executive council of the British National Party.

ie zero.

Yeah he did good stuff when he was young, but like many of his political class does not believe the law applies to him.

Developer Security

I've worked in banks that have tried to implement "developer security", and the effects were hilarious. Well at least they were a few months later in the pub.

Outsourcing is no worse or better than other business activities, but the desire to save money means in most cases a decrease in the nominal size of the IT cost centre by imposing costs on other areas. It is insane to save £3 per hour to have a chepaer person when someone whose full up costs is 50 is left without the technology their work is dependant upon.

Also there is an inherent problem that most IT people do try to keep costs down and do a good job. But once you join an outsourcer job pay is based upon keeping the client cost up.

Also staff turnover in outsourcers is amazingly high, so the staff don't identify with their employer, much less the client.

A better class of bottom feeder

>I really don't understand why banks run multi-billion dollar businesses on Excel spreadsheets

They don't.

They run multi-*billion* $ businesses on Excel :)

Excel is a good tactical development environment, can talk to financial data sources, and produces pretty graphs. As I mention there are tools like Xenomorph which help you make spreadsheet apps industrial strength, but most banks don't use them much.

>I'm always perplexed to hear fellow (non-banking) programmers wistfully >speculate about how great it would be to work in banking.

I've worked in non banking. It was shit. (computer manufacturers, circuit board maker, hotel IT, and even publishing)

IT people are the bottom of the food chain pretty much everywhere, indeed with outsourcing many have been moved out of the chain altogether. You've seen IT departments outside banking right ? Have you ever seen an IT dept. that wasn't in the worst bit of the building ? Often underground ?

In banking it's just as bad, but you get paid more, as a pimp in this area, that average a factor of two. If you're outrageously good at C++, let me know...

To Dr, Chris Johnson

We have banks looking for good PhDs, but sadly not in S/W Engineering, several of the banks who pay the most have explicitly told us that they don't want CS PhDs for the top roles. They prefer physics & engineering, and will look at economics/finance.

We do have a job that I don't know that you can't do, though my experience of British CS PhDs makes me skeptical.

We need a fuck off good C++ developer who can write high performance code that is highly reliable. Can't state exact numbers, being first year £60-120K depending on what you can do.

What people around here need to understand is that the vast majority of international banking is run by science graduates, and finance is what pays for Britain. Manufacturing is suffering the lingering death it so richly deserves, and there are now more Jedi Knights in this country than full time farming workers.

Damned Right

I find science PhDs for investment banks, typical entry level money is £60K base + 20-30 bonus. Good ?

Nearly.

We have had London bankers ask us for French or Russian PhDs because British ones are seen as soft. This is often British bankers making this judgement.

Easily the worst are Computer Science PhDs. Many of them have the technical content of a "business" Powerpoint by Accenture. A really quite scary % have "clouds diagrams". This is not a new wave of distributed computation, but the way that when you boil it down, they've driven some package which they didn't write and have made little effort to understand.

Actually, I can't remember the time I saw a British CS PhD these I didn't understand, so either I'm some sort of genius (which would surprise many people), or they simply aren't doing anything new.

Probability ?

Tim's response is indeed rational, and I mean that in the formal economic sense. That is not the same as wise.

As it happens, I agree about it being a power series, and the risk management used by investment banks tends to use all sorts of fat tailed distributions.

But tim, are you really telling me that you don't know anyone affected by the sort of car accident I mentioned ?

You can't predict the downside of transport accidents, I can see why you might be comfortable that way, but it is simply not true. That's why us science types get so impatient with arty Greens.

It's pretty much certain that two jumbo sized planes will collide over Oxford Street, in the middle of London. indeed the LFCDA has actually carried out exercises to deal with that. Not terrorism, just a tail of the distribution.

What risk managers call "fat tails" are a critical aspect of risk management, and it takes a very smart person such as my friend Nassim Taleb (www.fooledbyrandomness.com) to even try.

It turns out to be the case that in the future we can expect 10 or 20 times as many people to die in a year from transport accidents, No I don't know when, but that's the nature of randomness.

9/11 was not actually that improbable, indeed in the early 1990s The Economist did an article pointing out that planes hitting large buildings would increase due to this sort of effect. We are actually getting *fewer* such incidents than their theory might suggest.

All human actions, and indeed inactions have the possibility of amazingly bad outcomes.

The world can expect a (say) 50,000 death toll from a transport screwup with (I'd guess) a probability of about 2% a year. The mechanisms are much the same as a nuclear event of the same scale. Human error may be amplified by malice, and a consequence of a previously under-weighted effect turns out to be huge.

Such time series are of course patchy, in the last century the worst transport event killed around 25,000 Dutch people.

Ironically an almost synchronous event in Britain seems to have seriously improved life expectancy by stopping them choosing a truly dreadful diet.

Selective Arguments

Actually Tony Benn reflects an underlying ironic part of Labour policy for the last 60 years. They have always been into technology, OK not competently, but fans nevertheless.

Look up "white heat of technology", not a slogan for the thermal output of the next wave of Intel chips, but a Labour slogan.

If like me, you've been handed BNP or NF propaganda, you will notice just how similar the far right and Greenpeace are.

Both the BNP and Greenpeace want people to stay where they are put, and want to stop travel over any distance.

Both hate globalisation.

The BNP has hooked into the idea of stopping imports of food, and is at one with Greenpeace's view on "food miles".

Many right wingers of various parties are right up there with "protecting the countryside" from development and of course any form of energy production be it nuclear or "ugly" wind farms.

.

As it happens I think modern windmills look really cool, and am disappointed that they are as relevant to our energy needs as the "consciousness raising" that Greens prefer over doing anything useful about the problems we face.

As for Nickj's point, I used to be on the academic board of Queen Mary College, who did indeed have a nuclear plant in our back yard. Or more precisely under the Mile End Road. Rather than let us dispose of it properly one Ken Livingstone screwed us around and it ended up.....

Yep you guessed it right in the middle of the area where they are building the new Olympic stadiums. Since socialists of any kind simply do not care about anything that happens East of Oxford Circus, Livingstone didn't object much to it being moved to Stratford, indeed as I recall he used taxpayers money to make it so.

Of course the nuke people want money, they have to be managed. Alas that ain't gonna happen. There simply isn't anyone to do it.

If you told 100 senior MPs of any party that there had been a major leak of Nitrogen gas in Stratford you would get the following responses.

The Guardian reading ones would blame the USA

The Daily Mail reading MPs would blame Moslems

The Telegraph readers would worry until they realised it was E15 not the home of the bard, then stop caring.

Sun reading MPs would ask if any celebrities had been hurt.

I'd bet less than 10% would know that nitrogen gas isn't really that toxic.

Reckon they can make informed decisions on wastes disposal, risk and future energy prices ?

Title

OK, let's do risk management 101 shall we ?

For a start, let's just remove the clutter of a "small nation getting wiped out by a nuclear accident".

For a start, you'd have to be a *very* small nation to be wiped out by a Chenobyl sized accident, maybe the Vatican but not a "giant" like Lesotho.

I do not see the difference between (say) 50,000 people killed in a small country and 50K in a large one.

And yes, unlike Greenpeace I am prepared to accept that my favoured option has risks. I accept that it is effectively certain that we will experience some truly bad things from nuclear energy.

Using past data points, I guess we will be dealing globally with about one or two thousand deaths per year from accidents. That will be a mix of small and big events. Sometimes we will get 10,000 dead in a year, sometimes very few.

I believe that a rational person cares about dying more than exactly what gets them. So unlike a Greenpeace member a rational person is indifferent between dying of cancer caused by breathing in fumes from carbon fuels as from radiation.

Thus I would not really care if I were the only person to die in my accident, or one of thousands.

A rational person cares about the chances of getting shafted, what we non-Greenpeace types call "probability".

We observe that in Britain, you have about a one in 12,000 chance of dying in a road accident per year. Most people die in single death crashes, but those don't make the news. Train crashes do make the news.

If you were merely to rely upon the media, you would assume that trains were vastly more dangerous than cars. Indeed, recently one might get the impression that one only died in a road accident if criminals were making a getaway or you were shot, both highly rare events.

A trick we non-artsgrad Greens use to tell if an argument is bollocks, is to change the nouns, and see if the logic still makes sense.

Swap the Green "risk" argument against nuclear and you do indeed get them arguingf that trains should be banned. Firemen have been complaining for some time that the channel tunnel trains lack proper firefighting precautions, and that one day several thousand people with die.

But to a Green trains are good, so their risks don't matter.

Of course trains are vastly safer.

If you look at carbon, we see lots of people dying because of oil and coal, but usually in small events, and often because they are coloured the media doesn't bother much, unless it's the latest mass death in Nigeria from poking holes in pipelines.

I do like the idea of Greenpeace being infected by Munchausen

Tim Wesson talks of "nuclear disasters", but fails to mention the rather larger number of deaths from carbon fuels. Google on Aberfan.

Yes of course it's risky, all useful energy sources are bad.

Unusually for a faux green he uses something one might recognise as mathematical languages, but sadly loses it by the standard green arts grad idea that if there is ever an error in any calculation, calculation is itself meaningless.

His basic premise is entirely wrong though. Of course we should average it.

In a nucelar future, your chances of dying in some nuclear accident go up quite a lot. The question is whether the risk is worth it, a question that Greenpeace are uniquely incapable of judging.

He hasn't even got his politics right.

Historically the Labour party is responsible for far more of Britain's generating capacity than the tories. Go look up the role of Tony Benn in nuclear history.

I think we can take it as read that Mr. Benn is not Blairite...

He also gets "keeping up with the Joneses" wrong.

Actually it does matter what your neighbours do.

Ask a Mexican if they think their history would be different if the USA had been poor and lacking in energy sources.

If other countries have rational energy policies and we do not, then we will be poorer than them, and history is quite clear on the point that poor countries get shat upon.

All energy sources are awful

Energy is the ability to effect change, uncontrolled change is bad, and the more energy the worse it is. Dams cause huge environmental damage, windmills chop birds out of the air in pitiful numbers, and photo voltaic cells produce truly impressive amounts of pollution for barely enough energy to run pocket calculators.

Bio-diesel is already hitting the price of food, and modern farming consumes so much energy that it's not at all clear we get more resources out than we put in.

Genetic modifcation is of course a possible solution to the failiings of fuel crops, but Greenpeace's superstitious fear of anything invented after 1800 makes that equally contentious.

There is geothermal, which is about the cleanest non-trival source of energy, but it is a fossil fuel, and although the Earth's atmosphere may warm up, it's rocks are only ever getting colder.

I'm old enough to remember when mining unions cut off the power to people's homes. I have scars gained as a child in a house with no electric power. Not nice. Richer people could afford to get past this, and we note that the average Greenpeace person one meets is clearly from a richer household than the average Tory.

They can afford high cost energy, indeed taxes on foreign travel keep the peasants away from their favourite beaches.

I've been cold, didn't like it one bit

It is fair and reasonable to criticise the government for spinning.

But let us not pretend that Greenpeace is an objective source of information. They have a superstitious fear of all things nuclear comparable to that of a medieval peasant confronted with witchcraft.

For anyone other than the middle class arts graduates who drive Greenpeace, it is entirely obvious that nuclear energy can reduce carbon emissions to whatever level we like.

Is it worth it ?

Good question, but not one that is addressed by a allowing any statement by Greenpeace to be taken as if they were the keepers of true knowledge.

It is true that nuclear energy in Britain is a money pit on an appalling scale, but those of us who did economics beyond counting our pocket money know that energy costs have risen notably in the last few years, and very few are betting on them coming down.

At some point the odds are that almost any energy source becomes viable compared to oil, gas and coal, regardless of your view on climate change since we are going to run out of them.

We should not follow the example of the BBC whose "science" coverage seems to includes giving equal time to grotesquely biased and ignorant pressure groups whose positions are simply not challenged.

Nuclear energy is dangerous of course, and expensive, but we need a higher quality of debate than that which can be obtained by a rent a quote flake from Greenpeace.

Even More Comments by the Writer

I just would like to point out *again* that there is no bail out.

None.

The central banks are buying stuff off the banks and hedge funds cheap. My call is that they will make a serious profit.

There is a possibility of more inflation in this, but the net effect of the summer seems to have been to reduce such pressure.

As for public sector pay, that's a difficult and different issue. The government has been neither efficient nor honourable. But then again nor has any administration in my memory.

I note how the dimmer end of Labour politicians like Peter Hain complain about City pay, but somehow never manage to find the time to criticise those footballers, singers or actors who make far more.

I pimp for people who are the total opposite of morons like Dawn Primarollo, ie smart, extremely well educated and useful. The single most common name on my data is "Mohammed". Hain's cronies want such people to stay poor and grateful for handouts. I get them jobs which pay obscenely.

Yet more responses from the writer

It is a standard complaint of journalists that it's easier to write 2,000 words on a subject than 1,000 :) Glossary didn't make it to the first cut, but it's a reasonable request:

A brief summary of risk management.

Banks are required to keep a rainy day fund of money to cope with random shit. The riskier the position, the more money they need in this buffer. The regulations are a bit old ,and not very sophisticated, so much so that banks sometimes have more reserves than leghally necessary.

A simple portfolio loan requires the bank to have this buffer, to cope with bad debts, since of course the people that the bank borrowed the money from (which can be retail customers), will still want their money, regardless of the banks losses.

The capital required is expensive for bank, since they can't do anything risky with it, typically putting it into other banks or high grade/low yield bonds like those of major governments.

Thus "on the books" means the bank takes the full upside and full downside of any loan it makes.

If it sells the rights to receive the money, it can get a rake off, and let someone else take the risk. That means a high street bank is in effect a retailer of loans. Sainsburys is not the source of own-brand goods it sells, and Barclays is not the source of the money it lends. Both sell stuff.

Liquidity is the ability to buy and sell.

In many markets there are "market makers". They quote two prices, both to buy and to sell. This makes life a lot easier, and the spread between the bid price and offer price reflects the "service" a MM gives.

The property market does not have market makers, and most of us have suffered the pain that this causes. It takes a long time to sell things, and discovering prices is very hard, and imprecise.

However, you need decent amounts of capital to make a market, because you must hold a considerable amount of the stock, and have the pockets to deal with the screwups that happen. If like me you've ever been on a trading floor after hours, you will pick up phone calls of the form "hello, this is VeryBigBank, did you buy 3 million quids worth of bonds from us ?"

If the price of their stock holding drops hard, it can hurt badly. So they don't want to have too much.

Market makers, and other liquidity providers typically don't make big margins in their work. That means they are a bit cautious, since a small number of screwups can undo a year of profitable work. Getting market makers to actually make the market at all times is a standard problem, and I spent several years of my life embroiled in that situation.

Thus in a worried market, liquidity providers hide.

This means that people who want to get out of a position, can't. This means that the market sees lots of stock desparately trying to move, and a vicious circle may develop.

The actions of central banks is typically quite secretive, I did stuff for HM Treasury a while back and I was covered by the Official Secrets Act. In the words of the senior civil servant "we know where you live..."

But I pick up that they are providing liquidity, but with a very hard nose.

They are offering to buy stuff, but at a steep discount. My reading of this state of affairs is that the Fed and BoE may end up making a shed load of money out of this.

Responses from the writer

It's not "chaps from Eton" in the quanty game I have a database of their CVs, and we have more people from Egypt than Eton by a country mile.

The guy who didn't like my piece may have a point, but sure Reg readers know what a genetic algorithm is ? Most people I think know what "off the books" means.

A big criticism is that the "models aren't real", so I drew a parallel with quant and physics models, if you look I use that consistently.

I don't know what Breakfast is talking about. The quant types I know are of all political persuasions. Very few make political donations, though one is a local councillor (Labour).

Even the governments themselves have realised that most of their interventions in the market did more harm than good.