Beginning to Learn Computers

As I bring my fund, business, and trading into the 21st Century, I am faced with the dilemma that most business people of the past 20 years have been confronting with reluctance and delight: what to do with technology? Does your business embrace technology, dive in, learn as much as you can, and apply as much as you can to every aspect of your business that you can? Or do you delay, put off, ignore, and reluctantly install computers in the office solely, and install microsoft office only, and that’s the end of it? My business, being both as an investment manager primarily, and as a business owner in a family manufacturing business also, needs technology, the benefits so outweigh the time costs that I could not ignore the successes and benefits the industry of investing is gaining from these amazing machines and times.

I say this all to say that I will be teaching myself, and hopefully you, about computers as I journal or dialog my learning experience from beginning to end. The goal is to end up writing a trading program for one of the funds that would execute the trades in real time according to the programs I write based on what I currently do today for one of our strategies. The end all is to have the programs run all the strategies, as we watch, edit, and create new trading strategies. Today an enormous amount of time is taken to watch every position, monitor sales and purchases, short sales and buybacks, options, price targets and stop losses. The program, once coded by me to our strategy, would handle these hard rules and overruling tasks, freeing personnel to come up with new ideas, and tweak old ones.

So today is the first day, we will begin by describing what a computer is, the hardware and parts that make up a computer, and the software and parts, and how they talk with each other.

Thanks,

Dean