It’s been slightly less than a year since I last blogged. I stopped because of work at the fund (it didn’t really seem appropriate to have thoughts about the market be shared publicly). A whole lot has gone down since then, so how about a recap??

The last entry in this blog marks September 30th of last year. Around that time I had just started getting my online degree at WGU in CS, my best friend Jesus had moved out here to Palo Alto with me less than 2 months prior, and it was the beginning of my great adventure with Leggenda Entreprises!

Definitely one of the best experiences of the past year had to be running my own hedgefund! I learned so much on the field, too bad I literally started working on August 18th which is when China looked at risk of defaulting so the market started collapsing. Man…was that stressfull! Still, the intensity of the experience forced me to change my strategy very quickly, and very quickly I also learned the big difference between knowing theory and practice. Having to wake up at 5:30am every day also forced me to establish a routine, which helped me engineer a better, healthier lifestyle that made me stronger, sharper and more productive.

I think I lost about 30 punds, but more importantly I took back control over my life. In high school I defintely let my health go, I developed an addiction to coffee, and I overall let stress take over my life. Looking back at those 4 years, every day felt like a battle against my body, when I kept fighting against the constant, persistent urge to collapse unto the floor and sleep. Work was so helpful in reaffirming my commitment to get back to my healthy ways. At one point I was doing yoga 3 times a day, I now play tennis almost every day and do cross fit 3 times a week.

Still, it all came to an end in April, between personal issues for the other people involved and just overall bad returns, a result of the compound failure of so many of the strategies I tried. Too bad I had less than a year to prove myself, but it looks like I will have the opportunity to prove myself fully again pretty soon so I am really looking forward to that.

School blows. It’s not WGU’s fault really, I just really don’t like studying dumb shit like how printers work, different type of wiring and stuff. Eventually I switched majors to IT Management, because at the beginning of teh summers it looked like I had finally resolved my immigration problems for good by convincing this Italian textile company to hire me as their CTO, work in Italy for a year, and then be transferred back to the US under an L1 visa which then would make me eligible for an EB1 Greencard just a few months later. Wow! That was a mouthful! Needless to say, it didn’t work out: the textile company backed out of the deal, so I switched over to a BS in Accoutning because apparently it’s the lowerst paid profession that still meets the STEM requirements for an H1B.

The idea there is to get hired at a non-profit, since non-profits and research institutes have unlimited H1B visas that are exempted from the lottery. The issue normally lies in the salary, because the government requires that an H1B worker be paid the average wage for their profession (which is fair I guess). Unfortunately (I am being sort of ironic here) the average salary for a software developer is $80k, which would be really awesome in any other circumstance except it’s really hard to convince any non-profit to put up that kind of money for a software developer. Luckily, accountants are not paid a whole lot (about half of the salary for a software developer) which makes it easier.

This is it for now. I’ll probably make another post soon explaining in more details a bunch of the crazy shit that went down this year. Between visiting a sex club, trying psychedelics, watching an Academy Award nominated movie every day and making huge improvements in my progrmaming skills I am sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.