I work as a quantitative portfolio manager focused mostly on digital assets while living sometimes as a digital nomad.
I am a recovering tradfi banker. I worked in traditional finance for +10 years as an investment banker, derivatives trader, and quantitative portfolio manager before leaving for entrepreneurial pursuits.
I grew up with computers and fell in love with programming in my teenage years.
I am currently learning Spanish. Habla español conmigo!
What's the point of this blog?
When I worked as a suit and tie chained to a desk in traditional finance we were prohibited from sharing almost anything online. I started this blog as a way to document and share the things I have learned and found useful in my journey.
I am currently learning web3 technologies to be able to do more first-hand research. Namely, Solidity/Rust for smart contracts and JS (and its thousands of frameworks, but mostly Next.js) for front-end.
Brief timeline of my career
I studied Finance and Mathematics at McGill University. My first job was an investment banking analyst. I was fairly shocked that despite the glamour and image portrayed during the interview process, you didn't really need to know more than high-school math. I had written a slew of macros in VBA to automate most common tasks in IB that somehow seemed like magic to pretty much everyone in the investment bank and a decade later I hear that people still use them.
Eager to do something more mentally stimulating, I completed a Master of Financial Engineering in UC Berkeley and worked almost ten years as a quantitative portfolio manager mostly trading global macro volatility.
Despite having dismissed crypto in 2012 after a grand total of 10-minutes of reading Financial Times, I thankfully rediscovered it in 2016 and finally understood its premise and value-add. I was the head of blockchain research for two years in my last job and decided to pursue it full-time after.
I love math, computer science, and finance. Blockchain is the perfect technology intersecting all three.
I am a stern believer of building multiple passive income streams.
Tech stack
My toolkit includes a heavy dose of Python and Rust, with occasional C++ and JS/TS. I am learning Solidity now to be able to research defi protocols first-hand.
This blog is hosted on Vercel, and was absolutely overengineered with Next.js, Tailwind, TypeScript, and uses Umami Cloud for analytics. Before you flame me for using Next.js for a static blog that could've been done with plain HTML/CSS, I would say that this is more of a playground for learning. The website is rendered server-side, served statically, and has high Lighthouse scores.
Huge thanks to Timothy Lin for the original starter blog and Tuan Anh Huynh for the updated version!