The First Post !

Great ... This is the first post since I opened this blog three years ago !

Who am I? What am I doing? Where do I live? ...

Well, I'm a phd student, or "candidate" since I'm already finishing my third year. I study economics, now I have a desk at SIPA building at Columbia University in New York. I almost work here everyday from morning to late night. Am I a workaholic? Maybe. Anyway, I passed qualifying exams, so I'm supposed to find a topic to do research about economics. But I really find myself not interested in most topics economists are talking about -- empirical industrial organization, network theory, hospital system ... I know they are important things and we really need some people to do these research but I really am not interested. What I'm interested should be a vast area -- it should have a huge amount of information for me to learn, and it should be exciting -- it should be changing everyday, and it should involve a lot of people (not like some area only less than 100 people are doing topics in the world). So it's finance. It's the market.

I'm obsessed with financial market now. I have been obsessed for one year. Securities markets and real estate market are fascinating. So I opened a trading account on Interactive Brokers (IB) and put some money into it. Also I subscribe some services like Reuters. Now I can watch the market data, which is fascinating, everyday and I trade some stocks and ETFs/ETNs on my own.

I'm not a great programmer but I'm into it. Every time I think I find a trading idea, I can't help writing it down and use historical data to back test it. It's really time-consuming because I don't have back desk support like a trader in a company, but I grow with doing it. I learn something everyday.

So in this blog, I'll post my learning process, my thoughts about the market and others about my life. Can't imagine how I will feel in one year when I look back -- but I hope the feeling will be great.