Flow of Time

I am displeased at my delay to returning to the writing desk, not to mention jealous of a friend and how her catalytic push seems to have yielded more fruit than I have to show thus far. But by no means is this a race, and I have been busy with tasks recently. Notably, I had finally finished the module exam for the Certificate in Quantitative Finance (the fourth of six). Additionally, I've been attending various events and performing some ferrying by car.

Sure enough, I'll ensure this won't be a one-post blog, and here I am. And the issue of time has crept into my mind. What about time, you ask? All of it! Well, I'm being facetious--time as it applies to at least three points (by my count thus far in my head).

And, academically speaking, I wear many hats, and time's arrow is known all too well in differing language; transient and steady state regimes, the fourth dimension (in Minkowski spaces, delving into special relativity), the approach to equilibrium.

And the newest area of study where I'm learning about time is in the realm of finance, governed by the Greek Theta. There was a trader who came to speak at Pitt about trading in the real world. He did not represent someone connected to the quant world and models, so I couldn't talk much shop with him about how quants trade, but the trading game attracts all sorts of styles and strategies. And someone had asked him on which timescale he trades. And indeed, he admitted some people go for intra-day, some go for month, quarter, year, but he traded on the week scale. Why? That's what worked for him.

A natural question to follow would be, "So, what time scale do you work on? How far do you plan into the future? How much slack do you leave for contingencies? How wide of a view do you take to your dreams and aspirations?"

Pondering this question, I think the answer is heptagon. A blue one, but not too blue, I think.
I also think it is high time for me to change my time scale.

As someone who has gone through school at an untraditional rate, I have spent much time pondering how my friendships have evolved through time. I've explained to a friend how as the progress for my academic careers have progressed, so did the age gaps between my peers and me. A striking example that comes to mind would be my systems engineering senior design project. The final project was to design a beer factory (I was in the fermenter group). The final presentations were held in the basement of Joe Mama's to give the opportunity for beer to be consumed while talking about the mathematical framework that might underpin its production. And there were only two people who were disqualified from drinking at the presentations: the professor (since one is not permitted to simultaneously drink and grade), and me (since I was not of age). I like to think that age gaps don't matter when it comes to two souls bonded by friendship, and while that may be ostensibly true, I feel that I lost a lot of people that I could have otherwise known for longer and deeper. Was it really the case that my personality was so poisonous that all the people I met in high school, college, and graduate school didn't enjoy my presence? I hope not. Rather, I lost touch because I was simply not there. This was made apparent to me at a house party in 2009, a grand party it was, and a lot of people I entered my undergrad with were there. For most of the attendees, it would be their last party at Pitt before they went off to work. By this time, I was already finishing my first year of graduate work, but what struck me were the people happy and surprised to see me. The bioengineers thought I had gone off to computer engineering, and the computer engineers though I had gone off to bioengineering. And while I reveled with them that night, I couldn't help but think how far out of touch I had been with it all, how many more nights it could have been like this.

In matters of romance, the pacing requires the middle path--not too fast, not too slow. The premature "I think I'm in love with you" has made for a good laugh. And similarly, waiting too long to express feelings is probably just a longer route to a worse demise. And, unfortunately, I've got some embarrassing stories of me being in the latter category. And a friend pointed out to me that in the stories I've told her, I hem-haw around for a while and lose the opportune moment. The consensus is that I take too long to deliberate and don't take action.

Some say it's a sticky but trivial problem; just stop thinking and do. In other worlds, the writing on the wall can be grim. The guest trader warned that, while there are steps required to mitigate risks and minimize potential loss, you have to take the initiative and believe in your trades to realize any returns. And while I am just a fledgling when it comes to trading, my next step in my plan to expand my expertise was to write a framework to back-test various strategies across different trading periods to see how they performed as a function of whatever variables I could get historical data on. And while it may be (generally speaking) imprudent to apply romantic advice towards investment strategies, this could be yet another example of where I should get my hands dirty and ask questions later.

Risk and return comes up time and time again in the theme of finance. While risk isn't as applicable in friendships, it does seem to be a sticking point in romance. Sitting and overanalyzing never gets you anywhere and yet I focus too much on the long-term, missing what needed done yesterday to get off the ground. Someone had joked with me on New Year's Day that if I didn't ask out this one girl by Valentine's Day, he would tell her how I felt. He didn't follow through, Valentine's Day came and went, leaving only a "what if?" And while we can scathingly linger on "what if," a new complaint arises: if you actually liked the girl that much, there wouldn't have been any waiting at all, instead driven by your feelings to ask her out.

Worried that I wouldn't have enough content for this post, I went in search of an applicable quotation about time. I hate starting a post with a quote (which is too cliché).

"Calendars are for careful people, not passionate ones."
-- Chuck Sigars

While I have difficulty accepting this quote as the guiding thread of this post, its sentiments are relevant. Passion drives and defines people and their actions. And with the culmination of this post, I make a New Year's Resolution that I'll be more of a go-getter, take the risk and reap the outcome. You might think it's silly to make a New Year's Resolution now, but why wait for some date to come? Wouldn't that be counter-productive? :) Because after all, it's the hyper-risk-averse behavior I'm looking to shed. And so, the quotation that better reflects my thoughts shall end this post.

"The only way to catch tiger cubs is to go into the tiger's den."
-- Found in a fortune cookie

PS: I had planned that the second half of this post would go into discussion of "flow," a new word proposed to me in conversation for concepts I've spent more than a moment dwelling on. Thus, the title of the post, "The Flow of Time," would have packed a weightier meaning. But seeing as this post has enough weight, I shall return to expand on flow another day. Additionally, I am so far behind on posting my Song of the Day. There is a post sure to come listing a lot of the spotlighted songs, but for the short term, it'll be an out-of-order hodgepodge of catching up.

Song of the Post (for as long as they are not in sync with the Song of the Day): Dire, Dire Docks