Putting What I Learned All Together

The title is the goal, currently I'm just glad that I get to use what I learned years ago, whether it was self-taught or self-taught-in-class.

As many of you who knows me know, I'm of the opinions that

• Degrees are garbage, and I can't imagine a worse way to learn than taking class (the kind you'd expect at most schools)
• I was required to take a much-wider-than-normal range of classes in my undergrad at Fudan, ranging from science (math, bio, biochem, physics), general ed (film analysis and making, pyschology, contract law, intro coding courses, and even, dansk!), econ, management, finance, public health and medicine. I switched major once and it cost me 5 years to completing all required credits under strict credits-per-semester rules, while spending a quarter in the beautiful La Jolla, and 1/2 year in prison confinement.
• I tried to pivot multiple times (in 2018 I want to get into the financial industry, maybe be a management consultant, be a analyst at a large broker or an asset manager, in 2019 I want to be a technologist and geek, and in 2024 I want to ____ (will probably fill this out later)) .
  • A Bain & Co. guy painted me the picture of what his job was like, and it seemed interesting because you have to gain knowledge about a sector / industry / company fast, work with numbers and solve puzzles. More importantly, visit the different parts of the company yourself, and gather infomation from humans.
  • I wanted to be an analyst not because I like writing reports for copmanies or industries, but because the how selective the firms are (the "elite" club), the notion of being on the other side, the Sell Side, and the power of my ratings and price targets.
  • Everyone's talking about the life of private equity fund managers - they're so mysterious yet so hyped up. Will I be fired if I failed to beat the market for consecutive years? I thought to myself. What do they actually do?

In this post I'll demonstrate where I apply what I learned.

Technical Skills

Every day, since we're in the computer age.

And with the help of custom made tools (or ready-made ones), I complete tasks so much faster than a person who doesn't know his way around the computer.

I learn to use tech faster, and I make and host my website without using Wix or the good'ol WordPress. And I don't pay for the evil company \GDDY to host my MediaWiki site.

They tell me to pull up a "Word Doc", hell, I don't even have Word installed! I'd rather download 10 copies of Archlinux iso's and etch a Tails USB drive than installing Word.

Everything is magically version-controlled, and I can sleep at night even if I rm -r'd everything. (-f is usually not needed, if using it on /, you need extra args for it to work).

I also have a good sense of what kind of software I'm using, is the desktop app just a fancy Chromium based thing with modern web tech, like TradingView, or is it Bloomber-Terminal-esque, like TC2000, black but fancy? Or is it SAP-style, like Option Stalker Pro? Or is it a hot mess of Java, like Active Trader Pro?

Finance (and Econ)

My first attempt to apply my Accounting knowledge is to use double entry accounting for personal finance, which I later decided that it didn't make sense for me to do that; next was to look for accounting firm (the Big 4) internships. Doing tax and auditing sounds boring, but was considered a good first step into the industry.

For personal book keeping, I tried ledger, hledger, (I like the idea of plain text accounting on the command line, since that was where I lived), beancount & GNUCach, and some commercial offerings like YNAB, but I feel these are too much and I prefer exporting data from my banks and brokers and keep them instead (or search on their interfaces).

The Accounting and Corporate Finance courses were certainly helpful now that I'm trading. Even though I'm not a fundamentals trader, I'm glad that I can read through balance sheet without much trouble and can understand long and obsecure acynyms (prime examples being EBIT{,DA}, GAAP, and gross-*, margin-*).

So the Accounting concepts are useful when you want to dive into the earning reports, while the concepts covered in Corp Fin are immediately useful when you look at the basic company profiles, the fundamentals and the 100 ratios, or when you pull up the Scanner. "Quick Ratio" is a new one I recently learned, I don't remember this in my textbook.

Another important Accounting concept is the value time decay, or depreciation, it works with buying new machines, new cars, and even being long on options (the Theta decay).

I also took the Currency and Monetary System course, this and the econ courses were on the mathy side. I forgot most of them, except remembering the 100 ways you can do compounding with different rates.

Yeah econ courses did help me understand the impact of likely rate cut that is scheduled to be anounced in the next FOMC meeting.

Treasury-derived ETFs confused me, I wasn't sure what the significance $TLT has. I had to go to Investopedia to refresh my knowledge of fixed-income securities, just like the 100 times I had to refresh my memory before the Corp Fin final.

Besides interest rate and a few indexes (PMI, CPI), I have to look them up to understand what they mean for the market. Or I could just pull up $SPY or /ES and the direction will be clear.

Technical Analysis of Securities (證券投資分析)

This was one of the course that you didn't think would be offered at the school.

This course talks about very basic and old school tools and indicators for TA, including cycles (accumlation, distribution etc), resistance and support, trendlines, patterns, MACD / RSI (they don't work in today's market btw).

I wish the instructor mentioned why TA works (self-fullfilling prophecy), and demonstrate his profitability. :)

I read the book from cover to cover, and this was my intro to the fascinating world of charting.

SEC Practitioner Licenses

I passed the SAC tests (technical knowledge, regulations and laws) to get licenses for practicing in the securities industry, both of them are expired, sadly. They'd have to be renewed every 2 years.

I only read about options and futures in the books before, recently I started learning how to be trade them. The goal of the latter is much better than getting a license and never trade the derivatives for learning purposes, because I have to make sure I really understand something to lower the risks of making grave mistakes or account wipe outs.

The licenses are the bare minimum to practice, and getting an internship at a top firm was hard for those who don't have connections and do not "major in that".

Management

This taught me how to make fancy management-consulting-firm-style powerpoints (JK).

Ok I guess my take away is that managing people, or a business, is hard. And since I'm not in a position where I can get hands-on experience with this, I lost some interest in it.

But the decision making frameworks are pretty cool.

And with the business world putting

Medicine

This taught me fancy terms, and a glimps into the intricate and vulnerable human body (healthy and pathological).

It was fun besides the finals, and I'm glad that I learned them.

I learned the 100 ways you can fuck your body up, some are irreversible, some are fatal, some are beautiful. I guess that could help me prevent certain risks, and have more compassion for those less fortunate health-wise or genetically.

I took the FMPH 110. Health Behavior and Chronic Diseases course at UCSD, but my life style didn't change to be healthier.