This is more of a look into my mind and the journey I have taken over the last few weeks and months. It is personal, but I feel it is important for anyone who wishes to come on this journey with me to know what is going on behind the scenes.
I have been a serial entrepreneur for most of my life. In almost every previous venture, I have taken on partners. This time around, I have gone it alone for a number of reasons, which I won’t go into right now.
Around May/June 2023, I figured out what I wanted to do after a major breakup with my business partners when I was the CEO of an FX broker, which I won’t mention here. The markets are my passion. I love trading, and I love researching and building models. The time had come to build a financial media and research boutique.
I have spent about 8 months building various models and charts with the goal of having them displayed dynamically on a website. I chose to do everything in Python. I will go into the technical reasons, but as a slight detour, I will share one of the reasons. I am addicted to learning. To use a big word, I am an epistemologist. I know many of you are wondering what that means, so I will spare you the effort of looking it up. The Oxford dictionary defines it as the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
The beauty of building everything myself means that I need to learn new skills or improve old ones. It means becoming familiar with the different technologies on the market. It means learning more about the offerings of different data vendors. It means understanding what free data sources exist and their respective API connectivity. What could be more stimulating and doing it without partners allows me the opportunity to do what I believe is right, without compromise.
Every time I looked at a software solution that came out of the box, there were limitations. I am excluding the big corporate solutions like Bloomberg, Refinitiv, Haver Analytics, and the like. I have only once had a Bloomberg subscription. Unless you are managing some serious money, I think it is a luxury out of most people’s reach. I certainly would never pay that kind of money for the privilege. I would also add that it can not really do all that I want to do anyway.
Then there are the various systems like TradingView, MetaQuotes, Amibroker, Multicharts, Wealth-Lab, and a host of others that all do a good job, but they cannot do everything I want. At least not in a seamless way, and frankly, they were not designed for mixing economic and market data in a creative, flexible way. So that left me with something totally free: Python. The beauty is that there is no limitation to what you can do, save for your creativity and level of technical competence.
What is important for me is to create charts that are visually appealing, easy to understand, and useful. As well as a few tables of performance and statistical analysis that achieve the objectives stated above. So the process is that all the analysis happens in a Python environment, then it needs to get to the website, and then it needs to update dynamically. So when a Python chart updates, it needs to reflect immediately on the research portal website. This doesn’t sound so difficult, but it proved quite a challenge. Firstly, the WordPress API is very challenging to work with. I personally thought this solution would be relatively easy to do programmatically. It proved complex. I figured it out with some interesting hacks, but the bottom line is that my solution does the trick and it does it well. Never did I dream that I would become a front-end web developer. The benefit of the approach I have taken is that I really understand the data and the technology stack I have built everything on.
It turns out I put too much energy into building a very robust and vast foundation. I landed up trying to tackle all the major world economies and their macro datasets. I also have every future in the world in my database. This is fine for building a more mature product. Heck I am building an MVP I need to focus on building value immediately, no matter how narrow the space.
I wrote 14 newsletters to an audience of one friend and mentor, Paul. Just to make myself accountable. Throughout the whole process of trying to find my formatting and presentation style, something felt off. So I have taken a little break to work on developing the model to present something novel that is not being widely shared in the market. I figured I would rather deliver one novel insight, no matter how small, than produce a lengthy newsletter that is very much along the lines of what others are doing. I have also identified some small tweaks I need to test on real users.
So the game plan is that on Monday, March 4, 2024, I will start writing the newsletter again to Paul and myself. On Monday, March 11, 2024, I will start gently opening it up to the public. There you have it. I have committed to a soft launch date.