Phorgy Phynance

Oh yeah, another reason for this blog is to show off pictures of Sophia!

I particularly like this one with grandma

Well, the days of sitting around reading financial blogs in my boxers has finally come to an end [Too much information?]

I started my new job today. I’ve got mixed emotions about it so far. There are certainly aspects of my old job I’m going to miss. It was a lot more plush, e.g. I had my own office with a view and personal administrative assistant. I got to chat with super smart investors and economists daily. Now, I’m back to cube land (and I couldn’t find a post-it note to save my life). I will certainly miss the exposure I had at my old place, but I’m also optimistic about the new gig. Although I’m more of a pure “quant” now (just as everyone is learning to hate quants!), I’ve already started talking with our economists at the new place. I’m certainly less of an alien from another planet (the way I described being a quant at my old place) and I’m surrounded by other PhDs who are well versed in finance kung fu. It should be interesting.

One of the first technical obstacles I’m facing is that the weapon of choice here is SAS. I’m a big Matlab fan for quick prototyping of models and the unintuitive nature of SAS is a bit daunting at the moment. After about 15 minutes of reading the Little SAS Book, I put in a request for Matlab

I’ll probably also try to migrate to C#. From what I can tell, learning C# will be a nice investment that I suspect will pay off down the road.

Whoa! What a  jolt.

Just jumped out of bed because an earthquake magnitude 4.5 occurred less than 3 miles from our house

The new phone book’s here! The new phone book’s here! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need! My name in print! That really makes somebody! Things are going to start happening to me now.

- The Jerk (1979)

I made it to the blogroll on Panzner’s Financial Armageddon blog! Thanks

[Update: I was saving this image until I had a chance to review "Financial Armageddon", but thought it was appropriate to display it here ]

So far people who have commented (both publicly and privately) about my blog are more interested in how cute Sophia is! I don’t want to disappoint whatever audience I have so far, so here is a treat.

I wonder who she learned this from