Hello Again

“We're sorta like 7-Eleven. We're not always doing business, but we're always open.”

The above quotation, a surprising bit of competent writing in the ur-bro spectacle that is The Boondocks Saints, has stuck with me well beyond the sloughing off of the rest of that film as I grew up and my tastes matured. It doesn’t hurt that a pre-Walking Dead, pre-Death Stranding Norman Reedus does a hell of a job delivering that line in way that convinces the viewer that his character believes this statement to be a mantra of his and his brothers’ modus operandi. It’s a consumerist-adjacent contextualization of the preparation is as much a part of the process as the execution. You may not be making noise or drawing attention to yourself, but it doesn’t mean that work isn’t being done behind the scenes.

It has been over two years since my last post on this site, and over a year since my last update on daily COVES performance over on the Novatero Investments Twitter account. Work on COVES continues, and testing of V2 of a trading strategy around the concept is currently ongoing. GAIA continues to impress, and recent acquisition of an affordable company financials data source has not only allowed for a re-energizing of the strategy, but it has also allowed for a more-complex offshoot of GAIA to become feasible on the time-scale such strategies necessitate. I plan on providing more information and a research paper on this new strategy, tentatively titled Global Anomalous Equity Allocation (GAEA, because of course), in the coming weeks or likely months.

So…why the extended absence? Well…life got in the way. A seven year-long journey of supporting my partner and their journey through medical school and residency culminated in 2023, with them finally getting a full-time position as an attending physician. I spent much of that time working multiple jobs and projects to get us through that as well as allow for us to store away additional funds for a house and retirement. Once that baton was effectively handed off to my partner, I…burnt out. Hard. Even a reduction in projects and responsibilities didn’t abate that feeling. I continued to work on Novatero projects during this time, but I couldn’t be asked to write posts or share progress at all. It didn’t help that I absolutely shattered my humerus in a freak bike accident at the end of 2023, leading to a long recovery and a complete readjustment in my hobbies.

Fortunately, this readjustment and the feeling of absolute indifference to work allowed for much more of an introspective period that saw me refocusing on my personal life. We finally got out and travelled more, spending a working month in Honolulu as well as trips to CDMX, Japan, Belize, and the Rockies. We bought a house with an absolutely killer view (seriously, we can see Mexico on a clear day; how many people can see another country from their living room?) and have spent a lot of time making it a home. It’s been refreshing, and while I have guilt in putting a heavier onus on breadwinning on my partner, I do anything and everything to take additional stressors off of their plate at any opportunity.

But now, as we enter 2025 and what will likely be a very weird and unpredictable future, I am finally ready to start getting back after things in a more-public eye. Part of this is just finally getting back to the point where I’m excited about work again, but part of it stems from a stealth project that I had been working on in the latter half of 2024. It was exciting, it was a novel approach to data for an industry that is woefully slow to adopt quantitative inputs, and I was really looking forward to refining and improving the model(s) I had developed. However, as far as I can tell the primary funder of the project pulled out suddenly, and work for that project is on an indefinite hiatus. While wrestling with that news, something clicked back on in my head: get back to Novatero and work toward having the make-or-break factor in your job yourself instead of outside influences.

So, here we are. I have some ideas for how I want to move forward and will likely share some of them over the coming weeks and months, as well as some ideas that I have the go-ahead to write about. I may look into revamping the site, possibly moving this blog over to Substack for more visibility, and so on. Hours upon hours spent on a bike smart trainer has led me down the long-form video essay on YouTube, and if I’m very ambitious, I may take a crack at that. I’ll try to stay on a better update cadence, but we’ll see how scheduling falls into place.

It is good to be back. Time to get to work.