>First - I don't think a "developor" whose primary concern is income or getting rich will ever become a millionaire. That kind of attitude usually produces less than desirable product.

As one of ex-Yu rockers would say, "stvari bolje hodaju kad ne misliš na prodaju" (things pace better when you don't think of sales).

>To sell Newco1 as a merger prospect to another shop that had developed a trade desk system ("futures"), I spent 6 months - 24/7 - writing code that sucked data from fee based data services to predict interbank rates accurately out to 1 year. It used simulations with names like "Monte Carlo" and "Black Sholes". It did a great job. If the result said the 3Month Libor or Yen to Dollar exchange rate would be such and such 8 months out, by golly - and surprisingly - thats what it ended up being.

>He who knows what the interbank rates and cost of funds indexes will look like 6 to 10 months from today, could, dare I say, rule the world.

The code would defeat itself after having spread sufficiently. There's no such thing as a neutral observer. It's like dr Freud developing theory for his 6th book from patients who have read his first five and adjust their stories accordingly. If more and more players use such a prediction machine, the machine itself becomes a factor deciding a price of something. Maybe it would cause stable rates in the long run, if any number of players would start buying when it gets low, and start selling when it's supposed to get high. They'd counter the demand, and in the end you could just use last years' newspaper to read next year's rates :).


>That's why the DOT-COM boom busted. The DOT_COM deals were not about customers or sales there were about betting on equity values of software projects (some were just ideas without a prototype - evun!) that barely had a toe in the market.

I worked for a company which went from a sound business model into a fast-burn dot-coma, because of such attitudes. At some point, they started firing old customers. Ever heard of firing a customer?

>I decided just to lay in bed that monday.

cdow({^2001-9-11}) returns a Tuesday.

>Moral of the story - the gold is in your heart - do what you enjoy - never count your chickens before they hatch

We'd say "Don't put up a spit while the rabbit is still in the forest" - but the morale of the story is the same.