Yet another year is coming to an end, if you want to know more about me before, you can check My 2024! and My 2022 and 2023, Changes, Good and Bad. I think one thing I have learnt after turning older is
Everyone has things they are good at and things they are bad at. Do not use what you are bad at, to compete with others. Instead, use what you are good at—enhance it and strengthen it.
We all have limited abilities; none of us can excel at everything. So focus on your strengths, acknowledge your weaknesses, and don’t try to hide them from yourself.
From Tim Bai (This is quoted from my own saying, haha)
Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them
Romans 12:6
This is why I have started to do and learning more about trading, investment and finance, because I started to look for a career future to use my strength and I really want to have one not impacted much by AI, and it does not need to have a large platform to start.
- Software Engineering is a good path, the only not that good part is that it is hard for indie and small team, the large ones dominate, even you could have a great idea. You may not believe me, but I had an idea to build a Model as a Service platform, now if you c similar to Hugging Face in 2018 without knowing it at all, and this industry is heavily impacted by AI.
- Finance / Trading is a different topic, AI cannot replace human traders, one biggest issue is that people can be regulated and take responsibility, AI cannot. In addition, market has already been a black box to predict in most time, you may not want to use a black box (AI) to handle another black box (market), and it is easy to start for indies and small team. This is why I want to change my career goal.
My goal in short is,
- Learn as much as I can about trading, investment and quantitative analyse and quantitative trading
- Use all possible opportunities to practice what I learnt
- Figure out whether it is a good career future or a good career match
So what happened in 2025
I have learnt something about how to reflect in your career.
- Review the past year by listing how you spent your time, including key projects and achievements.
- Identify the bigger story by looking for patterns, trends, and why your work matters.
- Brainstorm your ideal career, without judging feasibility or practicality.
- Revisit your true ambitions and challenge the tendency to dismiss meaningful options too quickly as “unrealistic.”
- Set six career objectives for the next 12 months and rank them by priority.
- Choose one main objective by eliminating the other five to create clear focus.
- Create a short-term action plan with quick wins for the next 3–4 weeks.
- Decide what to say no to by removing or delegating tasks that distract from your primary goal.
from McKeown, Greg. “If You Don’t Design Your Career, Someone Else Will – Greg McKeown.” September 4, 2014. https://gregmckeown.com/if-you-dont-design-your-career-someone-else-will/.
Review 2025
First thing, TradingInsight is still growing slowly, as you may know we didn’t work much for marketing, we can get about 1000 users, it is not a bad achievement, also it survived both AWS outage and Cloudflare outrage, it does not let our customers down (too long).
- Worldwide AWS Outage?
- Cloudflare apologises for outage which took down X and ChatGPT
- TradeInsight.info Status
Trip in Japan is a very nice experience as the start of this year, Japan is such an interesting country, which kept the old and adopt the new at the same time. When you reached countryside, you may felt it is just a cleaner rich traditional Asian village, when you walked in Tokyo, it was like a hive, and we are all little bees in and out.
I also got my master degree officially this year, master in applied computing, nothing fascinating, but I got time to visit friends in Christchurch and spend time with them, which is the highest light for my ceremony.
Trading and Investment
This will a big section, and I will write more about this in the coming year too.
- I unlocked my offline crypto wallet, and started to do some trades, I transfer some into Deribit for derivatives trade, and some in NEXO for staking.
- I worked hard for Quantiacs quant competition, and I won an allocation of 50k. Is Quantiacs discontinued?
- I started to use proper trading software by switching to IBKR to build my portfolio. By implementing what I have learnt, I achieved a Sharpe Ratio 1.15 for the portfolio, through Option Trading, Asset Allocation and some Arbitrage Trade.
True Ambitions
After working so many years, I think my true ambition is actually not complex, not ambitious either.
- Get a career that I don’t need to dependent on any employers, I can be a boss of small team or an indie or an employee, either option I can have enough income for living of family.
- And I feel happy of what I am doing at the same time having the challenges and growth, to not be bored.
- Use this skill to help others too and honour His name in a way.
Goals
I started a open source portfolio optimisation library TiPortfolio, I wanted to realease a version before 2026.
I wanted to write a book of what I learnt about trading too, I got some name ideas for it,
- Trading README
- Get started to Invest
- Trading Manual for Engineers.
I barely started it, still need to structure and prepare the content better.