He's A Very Nerdy Kid (Mom Brag)

[alabamagal]

Aug 18, 2017 10:30:46 GMT -5 yogiii said:

Aug 18, 2017 9:40:23 GMT -5 alabamagal said:

My son didn't really get things totally together until his 2nd year in college.  Since his college major his first year was Undecided, the school had him take a 1 hour class in career choices - not sure of the exact title.  The information they gave him was really the same as I had been telling him all along, but that is where he got the idea to be an actuary.  Once that decision was made he chose his major, got nearly straight As in all his classes and began to focus on what he needed to achieve that goal.

Part of helping him get things together was helping him understand what he was good at and what he was not.  He would do homework, but it wouldn't get turned in.  We even had to have a conference with the principal in middle school letting him know that giving him detention for multiple "missed" homework assignments was doing more harm than good.  If he is getting A's on tests, he knows his stuff.  As a parent, I am not upset when you get a bad grade in handwriting.  In 3rd grade his teacher would mark 5 points off for forgetting to put your name on the test, so you get a 95, no big deal.  When I asked my son, he said he was just so anxious to start the test he would skip the name part.  Sometimes even to this day my son will ask me questions about everyday life, and I just wonder how he doesn't know these things.

I think I'm going to have one like this.  I'm really hoping later in life he finds a very organized girlfriend.

That is what happened to DS!  He now has a very organized wife.  Opposites attract!

[MJ2.0]

Aug 18, 2017 10:43:33 GMT -5 milee said:

Aug 18, 2017 10:30:46 GMT -5 yogiii said:

I think I'm going to have one like this.  I'm really hoping later in life he finds a very organized girlfriend.

I just want him to find a nice Significant Other.  Several girls have been interested in him (one friend even asked him to prom last year), but he seems oblivious or too awkward to go there at this point.  At this point he doesn't seem interested in guys either - and we openly discuss that and I have gay friends who we're close to so I think he'd be comfy telling me if he were feeling interested in guys.  Hopefully he'll just be a late bloomer on dating like he was on school.

I'm not making a big deal of it because he's the hugely independent type that often reflexively resists whatever is "pushed", but when we talk about colleges, I'm trying to steer him towards ones that have close to a 50/50 male/female ratio.  So many of the tech type schools he's interested in have such lopsided ratios that unless there's a bigger gay scene than they're letting on and that's how the additional guys are pairing up, there have to be a lot of kids who aren't likely to find it easy to date just because of scarcity.

but there might be nearby colleges with a more even female/male ratio.  I remember when I worked in Princeton, one of the alumnae (from I think the 70s) told me how the boys used to take the train every Friday up to party and find girls at Rutgers.  Yup, I went to a slutty school apparently

[Lizard Queen]

I'm not sure if you or your DS is familiar with this blogger, but his knowledge of investing just knocks my socks off.  Your DS might be interested in the posts about investing and business, although it's not quanty at all. 


www.joshuakennon.com/

[tskeeter]

Aug 17, 2017 16:42:28 GMT -5 milee said:

Oldest son (17 years old - Senior in HS) really wants to be in Finance.  He'd love to have his own hedge fund and thinks he'd be a good Quant.  That's a newish field where super nerds use tech to manipulate data, identify patterns and select investments based on the algorithms they develop.  Right up his alley.  

Anyways, he had a friend who worked at a local investment firm and asked the friend if he could talk to the managing partner about some investing algorithm ideas he had.  They liked his ideas and hired him.  

Today was his first formal day at work and Quant boy is so excited, he's talked more today than he has in the last three weeks combined.  They've asked him to start by writing a program to identify some sort of pattern exhibited by dividends.  Son had an idea for some additional parameters they could use to make the program better and they are letting him run with it.   He just got home, talked nonstop until he couldn't breathe and then went into his room to start on his programming.  

I'm really, really proud of him.  And for everyone with a really tough little person, this kid was one of the toughest little people ever.  So there's hope!  Keep them alive and what they do might surprise you...

I've always been fascinated by two aspects of investing.  The quant piece and what data analysis can tell you.  And the behavioral finance piece.  The often irrational behavior of the markets.  (I think the Eddie Murphy pork bellies scene in the movie Easy Money is a great explanation of behavioral finance.)

Opportunity often exists when the market behavior is inconsistent with the data.  For example, I used to work for a company that made lots of products from wheat.  Projections of poor wheat crop yields increased the cost of wheat and market pundits began to project increased costs and declining profitability for my former employer.  What the pundits didn't consider was the well known fact that my former made heavy use of grain future contracts.  And that the company had the cost of the wheat was locked in at prices below the current market price for more than the next year.  Rather than seeing cost increases and profitability declines, my former employer would actually follow the required mark to market accounting for the futures contract and experience large gains in the value of the futures contracts.  I waited for a few days for all of the reaction to the pundit projections to be reflected in the declining stock price.  Then I bought a bunch of stock in the former employer and waited for the gains on the futures contracts to be reported at the end of the next quarter.  I did really well on this investment and other investments that were based on a disconnect between market behavior and data I had about the company.

[tcu2003]

Congrats to your son, milee! That's wonderful!

And I married one of those nerdy guys who never dated in high school or college - we actually met at work, and I had to make the first move, but 7 years of marriage and 2 kids later, it's working out pretty well most days.

[Annie7]

Milee,

Your son might want to consider Princeton - they have a major called ORFE (Operational Research and Financial Engineering). My ODS just graduated in it. He was also very interested in Finance and the Quant part of it. He is now working for a major investment company as an analyst. For his senior thesis he built a game computer with GPUs and worked on self-driving cars - totally unrelated to his major but something he thought would be cool

Good luck and congrats on his achievement.