Thinking About the Future

Is something some people think I do too much of. Too much thinking about possible outcomes can result in "analysis paralysis". However, I find the big decisions easier to make than small ones.

Probably I will be giving up my position as a tenured professor fairly soon. The only scenario where I won't is if my university offers Snork Maiden a position that is acceptable to her and I decide to stay too. I think this has a very low probability. However, if they did make a decent offer we would have a very hard decision to make. Giving up a tenured post is a big financial sacrifice in terms of pretty certain future money and also the prestige in the academic community that goes with it. I probably won't give up academia altogether. Independent scholars (someone like Stephen Wolfram comes to mind) usually have a harder time getting their ideas recognized though it does help if they have had a conventional academic career first (Wolfram did). I might arrange a visiting fellowship or research associate position at a university where Snork Maiden ends up - the Australian job isn't at a university but my former employer is just across the street.

I've never had a dream of retiring and not working. What I have wanted is to have choices and now finally I can choose pretty much anything. But choices are pretty scary. Anyway, for the forseeable future I need to actively trade or have some kind of non-investment income, so the choice to "retire" isn't really there. So I am also thinking about how I will trade in different locations. Time zone matters a lot in trading. If I was in Australia I might trade the US market in late afternoon through the close in the Australian summer (the close is at 8AM Eastern Australian time then) and then the Australian market open at 10AM. The "model" is based on changing positions at the close each day so I could set up these positions with stops then as well as playing earnings releases. In the winter I would trade the macro news and market open (11:30PM Australian time - news at 10:30PM on). Probably I will wake up early anyway in the summer though I tend towards being a nightowl. I might mix and match depending on the news flow etc. The western US is a case of getting up early in the morning :(

Why not trade the Australian market instead? I think commissions are still way too high for daytrading individual Australian stocks. Trading the SPI futures - Aussie stock index futures - is possible but the big moves are set by Wall Street. I will have to see if I can model this adequately to make a profit. It's now possible to trade options online in Australia which would work out cheaper than trading the actual stocks. Exchange traded warrants were available to trade online when I used to live in Aus but they often are not very liquid. But I don't think I have any edge in trying to short-term trade individual Australian stocks. I will probably do some experimentation and see what I can learn.

Another idea I have is to interest a fund manager to work with me in developing an automated version of my trading system. I have some ideas here. Then I can forget about the clock :) Or maybe working with a trader in a different time zone.

More broadly I have a concern about how to spend the rest of my life in a meaningful way. Trading and investing is fun and makes money but it's not so meaningful to me in terms of improving the world which I still dream of doing. Should I focus more on the academic track? Partly I am frustrated with academia because progress seems so slow and so controlled by conservative gatekeepers.