Business

Automate Your Trading: Lessons from Software Engineering

My inbox is FULL. Always.
GitHub PR approvals.
Google Cloud alerts screaming about latency.
And—wedged right in between—execution reports from a few brokers politely informing me I did something… emotional.

For years I treated these worlds as unrelated.
Coding was the rational, well-lit part of my brain.
Trading was the fun, dopamine-fueled corner where rules were optional.
That worked right up until a few “strong conviction” trades turned into a full-blown kernel panic in my P&L.

That’s when it clicked:

An options portfolio is just a distributed system with terrible documentation and hostile users.

If you wouldn’t run a production service on vibes, why are you running your money that way?

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life

Raising Money-Wise Kids: Balancing Independence and Wisdom

There are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of status to measure yourself against others. Many people aspire for the former but get caught up chasing the latter.” – Morgan Housel

One of my goals as a parent – beyond concern for the child’s emotional and material needs – is to raise a happy individual who can stand independently in the world and avoid troubles.

It’s a simple goal on the surface. Still, when you consider the number of people who fail at it with resounding failure – yes, including the most famous (and successful) people you know – you understand the magnitude of the challenge.

Money is a unique domain of knowledge in that, unlike other skills and fields, most people cannot avoid it. Therefore, I should raise a child who can make and manage money to succeed (or at least not fail) in my parental mission.

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Dall-E painting the fruit market
Business, life

Options Strategies

A few years ago, I had the honor of managing a hedge fund with my brother. We used to discuss what options and strategies we should leverage. It’s a known fact that if you buy and hold, you will improve your probability of being profitable.

However, if you are a hedge fund, you wish to use some options strategies to boost your profit when the market is going up, down, or sideways.

Options strategies can be an effective tool for investors looking to increase their return on investment. Many strategies have the potential for significant gains, but the plan with tremendous profit potential is often considered a long-call option. 

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Business

Charlie’s Thoughts on Decision Making

I read a few years ago the Poor Charlie’s Almanack and found it to be a really great book for many areas in life. It’s also a long and heavy book so you might wish to get it it to your Kindle. Charles Munger is a brilliant thinker and it’s no surprise that the book is full of practical wisdom.

Some of the points I took and used many times:

Incentives – He talks about the incentives and how they are in the root of many systems. One of the more powerful statements is: “If you wish to see what people will do – look at their incentives”. It holds true both to people and to teams & companies.

Bias – How the human mind is closing itself after it ‘knows’ something. That might be really hard when you want to change your thoughts on a topic. You should embrace people who think differently and aren’t agree with you on every topic. It’s not easy but rewarding and will improve your decisions. Continue reading

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life

How to Be Happy Without Getting Lucky

Perfect spot for thinking and breathing

A perfect spot for thinking and breathing

 

All the great ideas here are from @Naval
I just edit it so I could comeback and read it from time to time.

1. Seek wealth, not money or status.

Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep.
Money is how we transfer time and wealth.
Status is your place in the social hierarchy.‏

2. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible.
If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.‏

3. Ignore people playing status games.
They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.‏ Continue reading

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Business

Entrepreneurs And Investors – Funny And Sad #StartupTips

SFO bride to startupsA list of the common sentences you will hear after a pitch. It meant to give you a heads up to detect the BS when it’s coming your way.

Common nonsense from Entrepreneurs Continue reading

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Business, life

7 Amazing Techmarkers

google-techmarkersI was lucky enough to be in the room for their final rehearsal (yep… it was in the same room that I gave my I/O talk). However, I could not focus on preparing, because their stories were so powerful and inspiring. Each and everyone had a story that kept the ‘wow’ effect. If you have time this weekend… you won’t regrat it. Continue reading

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Business, life

Are You A Saver?

I’ve read last night this great quote: “…On a longer-term basis, central banks and policy makers are really trying to take money from someone, or some class of asset holders, and give it to someone else. The asset-class holder under attack is the saver. This is the framework that has been created by policy makers trying to re-balance the imbalances of the past 20 to 30 years. To put it bluntly, they are robbing savers and taking money surreptitiously from longer-term asset holders whose assets don’t anticipate future inflation.”

Yes, as hard and harsh as it sounds, this is the current world we live in.

Monetary inflation robs savers. It’s a hidden tax.

When the rate of inflation is higher than the rate being earned on short-term deposits, the deposit holder is losing money on a “real” basis (= inflation). Most insidious of all, monetary inflation is a tax that takes its largest toll on those who can least afford it — the poor and elderly.

These are the people who tend to have a larger percentage of their assets tied up in cash and short-term deposits, which are steadily being eroded in value.

Sad? Right?

One way to ‘fight’ this is to have a balanced portfolio that gives you assets that will resist the inflation. However, it’s a skill that the ‘normal’ saver is not harness with. I do hope the in the future we will see different Banks (many be something like: Simple Bank ?) that will give the savers some kind of peace with more balance products that will ‘save’ them from inflation.

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