Interesting ideas about work going forward

What we should or shouldn't do for paid employment has been a source of great contention in our household for some time. I am generally of the view that we are rich enough to largely do what we want to and in my case this is focused on study and hopefully an eventual PhD and the publication of one or two books that I have tentative plans to write. But for Linda there is the tendency to think that we are not yet rich enough and this comes through in a rather excessive devotion to her own work with associated work-life balance issues, various tensions, etc.

This issue has remained un-resolved for some time. Our considered opinion is that it could be partially solved by me doing some further paid work - preferably in a high paid job in London for maybe a year. I am generally reluctant to go down this route as I feel the year would be largely wasted, but nontheless, I have been trying to get such a position for some time - but perhaps not as hard as some would be looking.

But another possibility has raised its head. Linda has seemed to suggest that at least some form of money coming in would be enough to "relieve the pressure" as she sees it. Moreover, she has seemed to suggest that some degree of risk-taking would be appropriate. I have, it would seem, lost my "entrepreneurial spirit" in my academic studies (though I probably work just as long hours as I ever did).

This raises an interesting proposition - I should go back to some of the short-term trading programmes that I developed when I was working on RA and trade these from home while I did my study. Logistically, this is not at all straightforward, but it is a possibility, and one that I am now rather excited about pursuing. So today, I signed up for an online charting package and have spent most of the day working through the manual for this, setting up some initial worksheets and working on some of my favourite systems. It was relatively easy to programme in some of the RA trading systems and at 1:30pm I made my first trade, buying close to £27,000 worth of UK equities, which, by the close of trading at 4:30pm had generating a profit of 20.3 pts or £101.50.

I now need to start generating detailed statistical records of the trading performance of this over the next few months. For instance, what is the average daily points result, what is the standard deviation of this, what is the worst sequence of losing trades, whate are the MFE and MAE of each trade (technical terms that are beyond this blog to explain at the moment) and so on? Once I have enough stats on this - possibly by the mid-summer - I can then up the trading accordingly. At my current trading size, I would need to average 20 pts a day to make the sort of financial contribution that I perhaps have in mind as the minimum acceptable that enables me to continue studying rather than going back to working in an office. This is a bit high. But once I am confident in the trading methodology, then I could up this trade size a bit - perhaps to two or three times the size of this first trade, and so the points needed would drop proportionately.

In the garage I still have several boxes of books from the RA days. These have been sorted through and I have selected a dozen or so favourites for further study. Strange to thing that I am enthusiastic about this idea. Once upon a time (late 2006), I had assumed that all this was behind me. Now it is right there in the centre of my thoughts again.

And could this project push me out of the tendency to depression that I have been suffering from as my academic life comes in for so much criticism?