Starting week 3 of 8 here in Bali. I moved today to a new villa (I like that they call houses villas, but I’m in a pretty normal place) where I’ll be for the rest of my trip. Tomorrow I have to get up at 6 am and go to the immigration office (which is about 1 hour each way) for an appointment allowing me to stay an extra 30 days without leaving the country. After that, I think my life logistics will finally relax for a while. It’s a little tough to stay productive when you have random urgent life logistics popping up weekly, but that comes with the nomadic territory. It’s yet another argument for longer stays, 2 months minimum, ideally 3-4 months.
The past week was pretty great overall. I did my training, ate well (except for the weekend I lost it a little bit), and worked. I also got a cupping/massage combo that took out some vicious knots that I had accumulated around my legs, chest, triceps, and jaw. It was an hour of me jerking and locking up like a fish on a hook as the massage guy laughed and apologized for how bad he was hurting me. I noticed the improvements in my mobility already today though, and it was definitely worth it. I had a massage with this guy before, who is quite infamous at the gym, and if you ever come to Nirvana Strength getting a massage with him is a must.
I was planning to brag about my new algorithm strategy running live now, but alas I’m still *one more* day away from getting it going. There was a technical difficulty, and then I started to turn my pseudo-code (writing out what you want to do in human words vs. the exact actual code that makes things work) into real code which got me stuck a bit longer than I expected. I now have all of the official code written out, and it’s just literally me moving three files into a different folder before running it.
The current hangup is from a few hours ago when I updated my machine learning algorithm with the latest data, and I started to get some different results than expected. I’ve been testing things by typing in different numbers, hitting enter, and recording the results. The results have been good, but different tweaks make major changes for certain weeks/months. I finally figured out a way to make a big list and have a program test all of the different tweak ideas I have, instead of me typing them in and waiting 2 minutes for the results one time-period at a time, and then having to manually change the next set of parameters. Hopefully there will be some clear choices! I’m feeling pretty confident now that my new strategies are good, but they are kind of weird, and I need this last step of making sure I have a feel for what’s going on before I unleash them into the frenzy of the market.
My old algorithm has been performing well the past two months, so that’s been a nice mental boost after a rough June. I’m much more excited about the new stuff though.
My girlfriend and I finished the series “Rome” (excellent if you like sex, violence, and moral twistedness), and started another show that is conveniently on Amazon Prime for the rest of the month, “Billions” (also lots of sex and moral twistedness).
Two of my friends (Ian and Andrea) recommended “Billions”, and I used to listen to a writing podcast with the creator, but for some reason I’ve been avoiding it. The miser in me finally succumbed as I didn’t need to signup for Showtime now that it’s on Amazon for free this month… and it’s been awesome! I think part of me always thinks that financial movies/shows are going to be cheesy and that I’ll notice too many factual errors (this has a few head-scratchers too), but then I usually end up enjoying it. For anyone in trading this is potentially a terrible way to wind your evening down, watching other people go through the highs and lows that you get more than enough of, but it’s also a bit inspiring. I don’t plan to work at a big trading company again, but I definitely get a bit jealous (of certain things) from watching the show. I get to live vicariously through the life of a billionaire hedge fund manager, an alternate reality that is fun for me to fantasize about, and as a bonus my girlfriend understands a bit more about what I go through with trading. Apparently the TV version using insider trading is more entertaining though than my reality of spending hours trying to figure out how to format columns on my computer.
I’ve been reading a mix of self-improvement/motivation, and short story collections. I enjoy mystery and sci-fi short stories, and find that it’s a good go-to when my novel selection is running dry. I finished “The Best American Mystery Stories of 2018” which was pretty good, but I remember enjoying a previous edition (2015 version) more. Since I’ll probably never grind through every year’s collection, I bought a few “best of the best” collections that compile the best from the past 10-20 years. I’ll let you know if I finish one that I really like.
Going to leave you with a pic of my girlfriend and I (I didn’t take any pictures this week, so I’m forced to share a personal one haha) eating out last week. Have a great week, and back to it!
Andrew Manser 