24 · Neon Hours

22:30 to 01:00 Korean time — this is when the New York and London sessions overlap, so monitor the market live and see how it moves. Liquidity spikes, spreads tighten, macro news hits, large institutional flows occur. Most FX, index futures and macro trading volume happens here. Now I can really lean into night trading sessions — watching New York and London at night, monitoring Singapore and the CSI 300 in the morning, adding screen time for trading and development.

I'm never a morning-type person, which is why a morning routine always seemed like bullshit to me. I work best at night, with my music, my laptop and the grind.

We're in this weird phase where both my parents and I are trading — they trade Korean stocks, I monitor the US and UK. Almost everything we talk about now is new terms, how stocks are moving, how quants are actually a great job — which they agree with NOW, like, fucking finally. One thing I'm grateful to God for these days: there's this random guy who's a quant in NYC, and he came on a reality show in Korea. My dad was all against quants — then he sees the Porsche, the Rolls-Royces, the penthouse, and suddenly it's "bro, you should be a quant dev!" Where were you when I was toiling away hours of backtesting and night trading?

Square loss — a loss function where errors are squared, penalising larger errors more heavily; core to regression and model optimisation. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange — the world's largest derivatives exchange, trading futures and options on everything from interest rates to commodities to crypto. ICE Futures Europe in London trades Brent crude and energy derivatives. Flash Boys — Michael Lewis's book exposing high-frequency trading and how speed asymmetries let HFTs front-run institutional orders; essential reading for market microstructure. Floored — the documentary about Chicago pit traders whose livelihoods were destroyed by electronic trading; it humanises the disruption quants caused. Risk premium — the excess return an investor demands for bearing risk above the risk-free rate; entire strategies are built around harvesting specific risk tolerances. Tight liquidity — conditions where bid-ask spreads widen and it becomes hard to execute large orders without moving the price against yourself. Counterparties — the other side of any trade; risk management heavily involves assessing counterparty default risk. Hedging — taking an offsetting position to reduce exposure to a specific risk; not eliminating risk, just neutralising a chosen component. Stochastic calculus — the mathematics of systems evolving randomly and continuously through time; the backbone of derivatives pricing, particularly Black-Scholes-Merton.

TSA — time series analysis, 시계열 분석 — statistical methods for analysing data points indexed in time order. Fundamental to trading, signal extraction and forecasting.

Every day is a data day. The habit has to be financial data research, reading, analysing — a decade of a bootcamp of prep.