A side project, The Creditcard Hedgefund

I like finance and learning about it, used to write about this topic here as well. I was thinking about getting back into the topic when I stumbled upon substack. Which is a platform for writers. I thought I might try this out and start a little experiment.

My real long term investment plan is really simple, buy an index fund and hold it. The main goal for my investment is to work on my pension. Long term boring stuff, which to my mind is a good thing.

On the other hand, a more active approach can ben fun as well, and very hard to do. As well as the fact most people with an active approach lose money or underperform a simple index fund.

But I am going to test this myself with paper short term (day)trading. And to give Substack a go I set it up there.

Researching the topic of day trading this reddit came up, and made a lot of sense. So I took this as a starting point for my own adventures.

Keep in mind that nothing on here or on my Substack should be taken as investment advice, please do your own research and due diligence, or consult a professional.

With this warning out of the way, I will outline the idea. The credit card hedgefund is an experiment to see if I can make a profit while actively trading my portfolio. The name comes from the budget I set myself to start out with, my credit card limit of € 3500.

It’s all done on paper, no real trades or real money is at stake. I might do that later on or try other strategies but time will tell.

I need to trade 3 months and make 100 trades and be profitable. There are some more specifications, but read all about it on my Substack.

Max MSP a learning journey

As some older followers of this blog know I have been learning Max MSP. Which now has more focus since I can work on projects without sound. I have been looking at various ways to keep it going and not having to stop due to insufficient cognitive energy.

I have been working on a new way of daily planning which involves shorter time frames and more of them, which has some advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage is the continuous workflow. The short instances the biggest drawdown.

Max MSP itself for me has a steep learning curve, although the help files and the various books on it are great, I am going to try and fund some one on one teaching to get up to speed. Hopefully this will help.

I have dusted off an old looper project, my first idea for building tracks based on loops recorded from a Eurorack system. It was a pretty big system I had in mind which I now scaled down to make it functional as soon as possible.

Momentum is key now, otherwise I will keep trying to bite off more than I can chew. I will also try and compose and share some stuff from this setup.

Less is more

The larger the setup the more options I have. Which I absolutely love. However this also has a time implication, more of my limited time and energy will go into setting up and learning how to use it. I have tried to use a limited set of tools before which quickly escalated into much larger setups.

I am not very good in keeping a small setup and focussing on just that setup. Which is a bit weird as my discipline is pretty good. I can keep to my planning. I suppose this is because I love my toys. I am like a little kid in a toy store which is allowed to play with anything. And this does not yield any result. Just a lot of unfinished sketches.

So this time I absolutely need to keep my setup small and learn it inside out. which will be my focus the coming month. I keep my timelines a bit wider as last time I got frustrated with not achieving my goals. In retrospect I had too many things I wanted to get done in too little time.

This time that has to change. There is a lot to do which will take time. That’s just how it is.