I created a side project this summer based on an open source tool which I use in my day job. My idea was to offer this open source tool as a service.

So I set aside a week to travel down the East Coast. Every day I went to offices and MeetUps and demo'ed the original open source project and my service built on it. Each day was 15 hours, door to door. One time I had to patch a shoe with duct tape.

A week after my return, I'll admit that the service is a failure. The idea is a good one, and everyone wanted to try it, but no one committed themselves to using it, much less paying for it. The trip was still a success! When you show people crazy projects, they show you theirs. The projects I heard about, I had no idea that they existed. Networking was good. Being new places was good.

The startup I was working on went under and I was on unemployment looking for a new job. A friend suggested starting a website that would make money from affiliate commissions. The goal was to make some extra money for coffee and to cover my cell phone bill while I looked for a new job. It ended up being a full time job and 3 years later I'm still working on it.

9 months of engineering for a core piece of tech.

Wrote the first commercial application for it within a month or so.

Doing great so far.

I've gone from §50 per week to §300 pw this year. Still long way to go before I can quit my job, but slowly getting closer to it every month.

> Did your side project become your main source of income in 2013?

No. My side projects are just my main source of expenditures so far :).

No

This is going to be a long one.

I started working on Wall Street shortly after the housing bubble in late 2007 for a very well-known firm. After two years of building various computational models based on esoteric distributions purposed for HFT, I realized that I could do it myself on albeit a smaller scale. I decided to target bitcoin because it is highly volatile and makes for a good asset to hedge against. I'm now making about 20,000 a week just on bitcoin trading with about 100k liquid (80k earned from trading itself, 20k from savings originally.)

I look at jobs as a good way to learn what is profitable, and self-projects to make the real cash. Salaried jobs are never going to give a person the freedom they need. And no programmers are "rockstars", musicians are..

I've been wanting to do something similar to this in the future after my education. If you don't mind me asking, did you major in Math?

I can't mention the specific degree because it would probably let the firm know who I am but I did not major in math, most of my knowledge of statistics, calculus, number theory, was self-learned out of curiosity.

This is something I'm very interested in. Can you recommend some books/courses that focus more on the financial/HTF side of things?

Cheers

Are there uses for number theory in trading?

Can you recommend any books or other resources from which someone mathematically inclined could learn the theory behind this?