Truck and Barter

On Tuesday, I take the macro qualifying exam. For those of you who didn't see this post, I was diagnosed with ADD at the begininng of this year. Without taking medication, I never would have made it this far. It was during the fall semester a year ago I was ready to leave because of my inability to perform academically. Only a fluke chance of running across an article about ADD led me to be tested. Medication is no panacea, but it has helped tremendously. Thankfully, Claremont is a fairly laid back place whereas at most places they would have kicked me out after the first year.

The odd thing about studying for the exam is that the toughest part is actually the easiest for me. Most people can manage the material covered in the Advanced Macroeconomics book by Romer, but find the dynamic programming part difficult. However, it is the former that is giving me problems as I basically ignored it for a year.

In addition, I'm starting to look for a dissertation topic. One of my classes this semester is design specifaclly to do that. If I can't come up with my own, one will be assigned to me. I figure with with my involvment with the markets over the years I can come up with something. My field is in international money and finance. The area I specifically want to look at is capital flows, equity indices, growth and the dollar. I never mentioned my training for my first trading job. It was in Amsterdam, Netherlands and consisted of roughly two sentences: buy puts, buy stock, sell calls and with my boss pointing the guilder/dollar quote, when that goes up, buy, down, sell. As simple as it was, both worked quite well. As far as research goes, I'm more interested in the latter.