Back to basics
My introduction to skiing was entirely accidental. Through some weird twists in my life, I ended up meeting someone in a tiny alpine village in Switzerland, where the only way to move around was on skis.
On the first day, her son told me, “It is straightforward: to go forward, keep your skis parallel to each other, and when you want to stop, make the front tips touch each other.” Nowadays, I hear the terms “French Fries” and “Pizza” for these two techniques.
While I am still a beginner skier, I have watched more advanced skiers swish down the mountain, and their movements are just a complex combination of “French Fries” and “Pizza.” The first time I had this realization, I was surprised. I thought that there would be more skills to skiing, but apparently not.
The software world is full of whiz-bang ideas. But as you peel back the layers, you end up with the same basic things. All the superstructure built on top of the basic stuff is derisively called “syntactical sugar.” Some of the derision is justified, but the “syntactical sugar” also helps engineers build things more quickly and fix them when customers inevitably break something.
The finance world is no different. At the core, everything is either a slice of an ongoing business (stock) or a loan (bond). Layered on top are indices, mutual funds, ETFs, options, futures, options on futures, and many other variations that, to the uninitiated, look like rocket science but are just variations built on top of the basics.