Where to begin - 2001

Luckily for you and us too, we are not going to be starting from the top in this account of our history. If we did that we would have to start around 1978, the year of Adrian's birth (He's the oldest) and work our way forward. We will abridge this though and just fill you in on some of the important details that apply to how we became a web site development studio.

In the beginning there were numbers

Lots of numbers... specifically prices. These prices gave us a good idea of the value 30 year T-Bonds on the secondary markets at the CBOT. These numbers fascinated us because if you could figure out a path that these numbers where going to take, up or down, one could make a huge amount of money in a short amount of time. There is a downside to this fact too: you can lose a lot of money in a short amount of time if you are wrong. We tended to be wrong just a little more than we were right. So we lost our money several times over. But it was a rush! We particularly enjoyed creating new ways of displaying the data - my favorites disregarded time and were motion based.

Take a ride on the roller coaster!

Many times we would take a position, have it go against us a bit, and then exit at a loss only to see we would have been OK if we had just waited. So we chalked up many of our worst losses to "too much emotional trading." Don't get me wrong, we had a system for investing: It was a technical system (as in not really based on fundamental market information) that we thought would be a winner based on the back testing results.

Trading with computers

Around 2002 we decided enough was enough: A computer would be the best investor! We didn't know how to code at the time so we asked around and found that the cost for developing an investing system would be high... Very high. So we though: hey lets do it ourselves!

Our first experience with programming was with Python. Python is an easy language to learn and understand but it was a bit too slow to crunch millions of data points in a reasonable amount of time. So we went to C. Fast fast fast is C. It did a good job of crunching numbers in short amounts of time however we were not very good at finding investing systems that could overcome the cost of slippage and commission. We eventually gave a go at creating a system that would attempt to recognize patterns of similarity between the current experience and all previous experiences. This was almost successful. Perhaps we needed to add more data types or weight the recent data. Eventually we went to college to see if there was anything that we might be missing.

Care for another byte?

During college we studied a variety of subjects ranging from yet more programming to art and philosophy. Our economics courses were quite interesting. They really opened our eyes to the full depth and breadth of data that was available through channels such as the FRED. It was during college that we learned of Drupal and we had a nice usage planned for it too; we were going to aggregate useful market data in a format that is more accessible. We never finished this project unfortunately. But it may be revisited in the future.

We gained several important things from our years in college: experience in many different subjects, new views on economics based fundamental market analysis, more experience in coding, databasing, writing markup, and lots of debt.

Show me the money!

So with our new found debt we decided we had better make some money. Our first attempt at this was in-appropriately titled "Makefunds"*. The purpose of Makefunds was to provide ready made eCommerce platforms for people to install and use right out of the box. We were hoping that by providing the software we would get requests to modify the system. We didn't do a good job marketing it and in retrospect I am glad because the business model was a total turkey. It was a pretty site though (mostly) and I still like to look at it.

After making a few other personal sites we decided to make a site to promote our services to others. We realized that: Hey we can make money by building websites for people... So here we are doing that very thing. We have been building websites for ourselves and others for quite some time now - about 2 years. We are still interested in investing however our plans for the future involve using our abilities in coding and designing.

Now you know

Thanks for reading this brief history about us! Please let us know if you have any questions. If you would like to chat with us about something, please contact us.

* Please note that the Makefunds site has some broken links and so forth.