Ok, so here I am looking down 8 months of “freedom”. For those of you who are not familiar with what leaving a (high frequency) trading job entails, it is more or less a paid vacation in which you can not do any finance related work¹ .

“So somebody will pay you money to do … nothing???”. I guess that is technically a correct way to look at it² . One could maybe go even further and say “You can sleep until noon, watch Netflix and play video games, and go out every night, this is awesome.” It’s not. I mean I guess it could be if you enjoyed doing this, but this has not been my experience for the past 3 weeks or so since I quit my job.

My experience was closer in nature to how I learned to swim back in Romania — I got thrown into a deep pool by my coach who told me to figure it out³ . I felt lost and paradoxically overwhelmed by having too much free time and nobody to tell me what to do. It is a truly strange feeling — having no binding duties, full control over my schedule, and yet feeling stressed about wasting valuable time that I so hard longed for when I was working.

So, after two days of feeling sorry for myself, I decided that I need to come up with a plan and do my best to extract as much value as I can from this period.

I started by trying to understand what non-monetary benefits my previous job had. The salient list I came up with focuses on:

• Learning – luckily the questions in HFT are generally hard to answer in a closed definitive form, which makes the process of searching for new solutions a great opportunity to acquire new knowledge.
• Objective – a well defined set of problems to work on restricts the set of areas of interest enough to provide focus.
• People – work is more fun when there is an opportunity to share ideas and gather feedback from people with similar interests.
• Structure – a clear separation between personal and professional time allows for more capacity to be present in the moment.

Next, I tried to think of how I can structure and design my time and activities to recover most of the above benefits. My schematic 3 step approach to this is quite simple:

1. Come up with a list of things that I may enjoy doing
2. Design some sensible implementation and structure for actually doing them
3. Reevaluate how progress looks periodically and adjust accordingly

I was so eager to feel a sense of progress that I ended up writing my first list of things I want to do in under 10 minutes. It went something like this:

• Improving quantitative skills:
  • Machine Learning
  • Math/Statistics
  • Programming
• Improving/developing qualitative skills:
  • Writing — hey, I guess I am a “blogger” now
  • (Generative) Art
• Networking
• Hobbies
  • Traveling
  • Coffee
  • Photography
  • Wine
• Exercising
• Leisure
  • Reading
  • Museums
  • Massages

As mediocre as this list may be, it has its benefits. First, there is plenty of potential learning (math is vast enough by itself). Second, the objective follows by definition — this is the (small) list of things to think about. Third, I am fortunate to know enough people that are passionate about some of these topics, and I can leverage my time to meet people in some of the areas I am just starting to explore. 3/4 after ten minutes of work already lifted my spirits a bit higher.

I expected the implementation part to be a bit more tricky due to complete lack of supervision, but I decided to accept that bad is better than non-existent, so I just started to divide my calendar into 1 to 2 hour slots in which I focus on a well defined activity. This approach solves the structure problem by definition and also thankfully allows for enough diversity in a single day.

As for feedback, this blog is partially meant to track my progress over the next eight months and hopefully share the insights that I will gain to a larger audience. The plan looking forward is to post regular (monthly?) updates with how things are going in addition to the rest of the content.

Footnotes

1. Usually in between 6 months to a year, but there are firms that don’t do this at all.
2. Probably a slightly more accurate view is that somebody will pay you money because there is a chance that if you do something, you may end up diminishing your previous employer’s profit. Personally, I believe this chance is quite small to start with, and has a rather long half-life.
3. This is seriously how my first swimming lesson went and if there were not for another kid’s swimming suit that I grabbed onto as I was going down, I may not be here sharing this story. The coach also made sure he shared his joke for new students before throwing me into the water. It went something like: “If you go down, it takes 2 days to empty the pool and retrieve you, so don’t go down!”. FWIW, I did end up going to swimming practice for most of my childhood, so I guess it worked in some sense.