Only a handful of handles are contributing content worth of reading, if it wasn't for them, this forum would be as good as reddit.
Stemming from the "1% rule" (1% of the users of a website add content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%_rule_(Internet_culture) ... "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" :
I started the post after a bottle of wine to get past initial inhibitions. Then since I was at it, moved to a sixpack of beers too, the 500ml version. Woke up in the morning with a horrible headache but at least content with the fact that I didn't open the second bottle of wine ... then I saw it, laying empty on my desk :| My level with options is "Arbitrage Theory in Continuous Time" by Tomas Björk and published articles in academic peer reviewed journals.
Yeah, I'm not in a hurry to get a partner. For now I'm gonna start working with my nephew who just entered university and is finishing first semester exams. About time to introduce him to real life software development. (He did computer science class in high school and now continues with the same at university level). The gain on my side by working with him at least on the short to mid term (1-2 years) would be mainly of the "rubber duck debugging" type: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging .
I feel for you. 15 years is a long time. I can tell you are extremely intelligent. People that are extremely smart often overlooked the "big picture"? I switched over to options in 2013 using simple rules and never looked back. I count my blessing everyday that I started trading during the longest bull market in history and I live in the US. Good luck and wishing you success.
My quick take: I too am looking for someone with the math and finance background; I have the software engineering background. I guarantee you run code I wrote hundreds if not thousands of times a day (as in literally today). My code is reliable and malleable. For this service, I expect to be paid. As far as I can tell, Finance and FinTech companies (and by extension, the people there), massively undervalue programmers. They consistently under pay, and treat them as second class citizens. As a result, I work for an actual software company, and just trade for fun on the side. The question to you is: are you ready to promise a huge equity stake? Are you really confident you can compete with Silicon Valley salaries? If you need some data on what the going rate is, there's https://www.levels.fyi/ .
Well I'm 43 so 15 years is not that much compared to overall, but is pretty much the time since I finally decided for a target in my life and stuck to it. Speaking of intelligent, I'm self-aware enough to realize I'm not stupid but also that I'm no genius. Main problem though it's not related to smarts but to wealth: "Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25942936 . Success in business (and trading) correlates strongly with initial available capital. Mathematically I think this may be related to the fact that there's a minimum viable amount for getting airborne, sort of a minimum runway length for airplanes. The problem with this world ... lemme quote Bukowski first: "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence." If you replace "doubts" with "lack of wealth" and "confidence" with "enough inherited wealth", he's spot on Then of course of the extremely few (in percents) who actually have enough runway to launch flying vehicle, the vast majority will end up in crashes. Let's say "the problem with this world == wealth" was a 2nd world problem, now we have a 1st world problem: "blame the victim". Of the 2% minority that had enough wealth to try entrepreneurship (I'm classifying trading as entrepreneurship too btw), 98% will fail. So overall we have a failure rate of at least 1 - 2% * 2% = 99.96% if we define failure as "not succeeding in entrepreneurship". Yet we blame it on those who tried.
Here's what I'm reading now (well, some 10 years ago actually : Here's a cover of what my grand-grandma was teaching (not just reading), 120 years ago: Contents: So around 1900 the mother of my grandmother was a teacher in a small village in the Carpathians mountains in Transylvania. At the time the region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Romanians were only one of the many minorities within it. Yet we had education in our own language, so it wasn't that oppressive afterall. Anywayz, I digress, lemme get back to the "wealth" or "Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship". Sadly I think it applies to my case too. So my ancestors were in the 2% of the 2% as far as smarts goes (few were literate altogether around 1900, let alone be teachers of literature). Wealth-wise, I grew in Romania so we're 2nd world at best compared to the reference on what having resources means. On top of that I grew in rural area. Local statistics say that about 2% of the village dwellers end up in high-paid urban jobs, although they still make the majority (>50%). Yeah they stupid (like me, whose family waz documentedly reading fluently since at least 1900). Btw, that Romanian you see in the primary school reading book from 1900 has kinda changed since. It's "peasant talk", sort of like saying "dweller" instead of "inhabitant". Or mentioning "Jews" as in "Jews consider the pig an unclean animal and therefore they don't eat it". Leaving aside the commies trying to obliterate my family for trying to stick out from the crowd, grandpa got a 16-years prison sentence for running a bar in the village ("fiscal fraud" they said), they were never rich, but getting by. My mother and father made about 8000 lei around 1990, having spoken to older taxi drivers who used to work in city factories, the average salary was around 2000 lei. So my folks were making 2x an average city family income but lived in a lower cost area, therefore... well ... wealth
Cultural mismatch maybe but I'm not hiring here. Larry didn't hire Sergey, or viceversa. I'm a mediocre (in the good sense, we have to restore the "good" vibe to this word) guy, living an anost (from Greek "ánostos": boring, unremarkable) life while employed somewhere. When my ancestors posted a "looking for a PARTISAN partener" ad, they didn't do it in all-caps. That's all I want to say for now. Well I don't work for the piece of shits anymore but for a decent technological company. Perhaps that's why I went a bit above my beyond to deliver the stuff we're working on since finalizing that contract means we score a victory on our arch-Nemesis: Google. Yeah, I don't work at Google. Because I know better >