It’s been a relatively busy few weeks here in Puerto Rico for me. Both Johanna and I had friends stay at our apartment, and I did my best to balance getting some work done during downtimes. I dislike getting behind on my work, even though I have no real deadlines, but there really isn’t anything more enjoyable to me than spending time with good friends when being abroad.
My writing and routines took a huge hit, but I was able to get quite a bit done with my crypto work. I mentioned recently in a blog that I’m really bad at multi-tasking, but was going to push through anyways. I decided to take it a little easier on myself, and primarily focus on one thing at a time. In my mind I wanted to do the work of a full time writer, and full time trader, but it just isn’t happening. A lot of the “work” for me is done on downtime when I let things rest in my head. For writing that is thinking about a future scene, and that starts to inform other scenes and what might happen in a story. In trading it is usually new strategies, and how I can eventually implement them in code.
I’m going to use approximately the next month to focus on my trading. I’ve been making huge adjustments to my strategies, which were previously somewhat on auto-pilot. My experience has been that after about a month of focused effort my trading becomes systematic for a few months where I can focus my attention on other things, before needing major adjustments again. Eventually sometime soon I can get a daily routine with it, but for now I need to keep putting in the deep work that I’ve been doing the past few weeks. The markets are now maturing enough where more complex strategies are needed and viable, and I have a backlog of things to test/perfect. The good thing is I feel pretty confident with my latest research and trading, but I need to work on optimizing/automating it with programs.
On the creative front I’ve been getting back into reading short stories, and absolutely loving it. I go through phases where I’m more into novels/comics/non-fiction, but I’ve only read a few short story collections. I discovered the series “The Best American Short Stories” that also has a collection for Mystery, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Horror, and Poetry. I bought them all, and have been alternating depending on mood. I try my best to finish a story in one sitting which makes a huge difference for my personal enjoyment. I want to work on shorts in addition to my novel (of course I say this after I mentioned that I started over-extending myself with my trading day/night job) so I can work on different genres/characters/techniques, in addition to being fun.
Going to keep it short this week but wanted to give a mini-update. Will be back soon to talk about my impending Euro trip and other news. Leaving you with a beautiful beach on the island of Icacos that I visited last week:
Andrew Manser 