I developed an interest in finance about half-way through high school, when I started taking online college courses such as Robert Shiller’s “Financial Markets”. I already had a strong foundation in economics thanks to my school’s Speech and Debate team, but Yale’s OpenYale project and Harvard’s EdX platform opened a whole new world for me.

I recently moved from South Carolina (where my mother and I moved to after leaving Italy 6 years ago) to Palo Alto to pursue life in Silicon Valley. I spent the vast bulk of my time familizaring myself with US immigration law (you kinda have to as a legal and documented immigrant), attending various lectures and events at Stanford, and diving into financial engineering by building applications and systems geared at making finance more accessible and the market as whole more efficient.

I am not legally allowed to invest in the stock market since my visa does not grant me a social security number (bummer). I say this because none of the opinions I will share on here will impact my positions or attempt at distorting truth in order to accomplish market manipulation favorable to my trading strategy. This is just me expressing some opinions that will hopefully reveal themselves to hold some contrarian truth that can help the readers.

I don’t really believe in value investing. I am a big supporter of quantitative and algorithmic trading, but I believe that the best alpha can be earned by activist investing. I take alpha very seriously because my startup builds software around it and its application, so making a lot of money does not impress me. I am a big fan of derivatives trading, so I am always very hesitant to reccomend strategies predicated upon investing in common stock (unless it’s in the case of actually exercising shareholder rights).