Love makes my heart warm
Money makes my heart calm
Humour makes my heart fun
Thinking makes my heart beats
-Ti Soe, 2025
Having achieved most of what I set out to do ten years ago, 2025 was the year I felt fulfilled. Meeting intellectually gifted peers who are great at orthogonal thinking, have drive, and have esoteric interests like Kafka, Chomsky, and Voltaire is a privilege that someone as extroverted as me can only dream of. I’ve always wanted to live an intellectually rich life, and my initial naivety about how macro trading can fulfil that led me here. A lot has changed. The 19-year-old Tiffany, who was inspired by Dalio, Thiel and Soros, understood the reality that governs the trading floor. Technological superiority is more important than intellectual thinking. Macro trading entered its prime in the 1990s, when governments tried to tame currency volatility by soft pegging currencies. With most currencies floating and some artificially held down, the golden days of philosopher-traders are gone.
I’ve always loved deep, intellectual thinking, and over the next year and a half, I’m fully committed to sharpening my mind and following my curiosity wherever it leads. This means a lot of reading. Just as much, I love doing the things I think about—and in that, I’ve always had a bit more courage than most of my peers. I’ve learned that not everything can be explained through pure rationality; some truths demand intuition, artistry, and context. Reminds me of Hofstader’s “Truth is not always provable; what is provable is not necessarily true”. Courage, I’ve found, is rarer than genius. And strangely, having seen so much death at a young age has pushed me to live with greater intention and urgency.
Yet how many of these are all stories I am fooling myself? (*insert the context of having been pleasantly intellectually challenged by another crazy math PHD whom I never met*) Having been in California, I’ve seen the extent to which too much thinking, too much freedom results - another comsci dropout modelling contemporary power structures while holding down an unrelated day job*. Inspiring both awe and disdain in equal measure—praised for originality, dismissed for imitation. And in the end, I can’t help but wonder: how much of it truly matters?
And it’s really funny, coming from me, because for 25 years I’ve been on the other side—where people in Asia told me that ideas don’t matter if there’s a high chance of failure. Not smart enough to beat the kids from developed countries for a scholarship—I won. Not a target school for the trading floor—I got the job through hustling and outperformed. Too unrealistic to chase intellectual ambitions—well, I’m doing it now.
Then why? Because pursuing high-expected-value, low-probability bets with a deterministic optimism brings me closer to my ideal self. And perhaps that’s what much of the Bay Area’s intellectual scene is about—a modern expression of America’s old Calvinistic impulse. A culture built on a sense of calling or vocation, born from the earliest religious refugees who came here seeking freedom to believe, to reason, and to build.
Girard spoke of two kinds of desire: the physical and the metaphysical. The former is a desire for utility; the latter, a desire for identity. The more I reflect, the more cautious I become about myself. I’m not as independent a thinker as I like to believe. I’m optimistic in Hong Kong, cautious in California*. How much of that is genuine reflection—and how much is simply the impulse to rebel? How many of my recent “wins” were coincidences rather than true independent thought? Still, to overcredit luck is to surrender agency.
Even with a framework for making decisions, I’ve come to learn that doing something different from the herd isn’t the same as thinking for oneself. Sometimes contrarianism is just another form of imitation. And so I wonder: how much of what I’ve done was driven not by reason, but by my desire for an identity? My desire to be the kind of person who thinks deeply and profits from it?
*Gray Mirror: A brief explanation of the Cathedral
*Hong Kong Executive: “I’ve seen many economic cycles—AI is another bubble.”
*Californian Founder: “I’ve seen many business cycles—this time is different.”