Seven Days

 

So, I am back after a long time, its 0949 hours right now on the first day of the last quarter of the  FY24.

The last I published was August 1, 2023, long time ago, I know. Things have changed a lot since then. I mean, Zomato hit their first profitable quarter, standalone though.

I discovered my love for spreadsheets, too. Microsoft Excel, one of the truly most amazing things I will ever learn. It was a product of a small gig I did in December’23 at an asset management company, man, I loved it, totally.
It was a sort of high frequency environment, no room to slack off, the trading desk guys started exactly when the markets opened until they closed, laser focus, jacked with headphones, probably processing loads of information, mostly all mentally, to get that last penny out of the upper curve of the graph. And they loved it, could see it in their eyes, while they moved here and there to look for that perfect dip on the chart and square off a heft position.
The biggest thing about all this wasn’t the money they made, but rather how they did it, without any fancy software, by just gazing at the graphs and making decisions, what helped, though, was their years of experience in understanding the mood of the markets. Being a STEM student, I always appreciated the power of math and computers, always felt, you can make more money using them instead of the traditional methods that already existed, the answer to that, is something I will always be looking for. Deep down, though I feel, math and computers can only get you to a certain level of cuts in the markets, the real money is made by those who influence it, going against the laws, obviously.

Being there for seven amazing days, most of my work was grinding excel sheets, reading and understand annual reports of listed companies and using all the existing information to predict almost the entire balance sheet and PnL for the next few FYs. It was probably one of the intense things to do. And for the most part, I sucked at it. Always missed a factor to consider.

The naïve coder in me always tried making python models and do the job, and when I got the results and showed it to the guy who assigned me the job, he just said, they are wrong, it never can be this, you missed these factors, go do it again. Obviously, I just fancied models and wanted to try them out, but in reality, it’s the only the human brain that can come to certain conclusions that computes might never be able to, might come close, but never exact. That’s when I actually wanted to work more with models, even though I knew they wont give the best results, but still try to make it better.

One of the researches I did was on banks and got really fascinated about how they worked, it was absolute nuts at some point. Realised why the government goes to help them when they crash even though they are essentially regular businesses. The work I did wasn’t anything fancy, it was mostly hard punching data, reading annual reports, con calls, etc. However, it still pushed my understanding on any sector or corp I read about. Made me sort of read in between the lines and understand the sentiment and use that to model what I wanted to. It required a good amount of focus and missing a digit meant screwing up the entire balance sheet which was probably lakhs of crores, terrible.

It was one of the best 7 days I spent till date.

Need to go, bye.