At the beginning of 2022, we began the Floodgate Reactor program with the hopes of finding a successful startup idea and learning how to build a successful company. We started the program with an idea in cybersecurity related to vulnerability patch management. By the end of the summer, we were working on an idea that focused on solving farmer labor shortages and building a global talent marketplace. In this blog post, we will discuss our journey and how our ideas changed over time....

Below are reflections of our startup journey participating in the Floodgate Reactor Program. We have strong opinions, loosely held and while these opinions reflect our current state of mind and understanding of the world might change as we continue our entrepreneurial journeys. Introduction H-2A is a US government program that allows farmers to bring foreign seasonal agricultural labor to the US. To learn more about the H-2A program, check out our other blog posts or the link here....

Introduction Everyone has a framework, a basis by which they make decisions and navigate the uncertainty of the world. Frameworks are developed over time through knowledge and experience. Learning is a process in which we can incorporate new knowledge and experience into our existing framework. Working on a startup opened the floodgates to new knowledge and experience rushing into our frameworks about building a company. In a small amount of time, it allowed us to understand how to rapidly gain new experience and knowledge…....

In this blog post, we will explain why H-2A is a crucial program that supports the livelihood of countless farmers and workers. H-2A is a US government program that allows farmers to bring foreign seasonal agricultural labor to the US. In 2021, over 300,000 workers came to the US under this program and over 16,000 farms across the country used the program. The H-2A visa lets workers stay in the US for one year, but this can be extended for up to three years....

Introduction I recently decided to restore an old Peugeot bike. I wanted to have a nice fixed gear bike to ride and learn more about how bikes work. The bike before restoration. In this blog post, I’ll talk about the process for disassembling the bike, repainting the frame, and assembling it again. I’ll also talk about some mistakes I made and lessons I learned that could be useful for someone attempting a similar project....

Introduction I recently read Ed Thorpe’s Beat the Dealer, a book about how Thorpe, a mathematician, found a way to gain an edge in blackjack. In the book, Thorpe uses computer simulations to calculate the best blackjack strategy as well as card-counting strategies. Since I took a reinforcement learning class last quarter, I wanted to apply one of the most common algorithms, Q-learning, to to find the best strategy for blackjack....

Faster than a Supercomputer? In the 1980s, American physicist Richard Feynman proposed the idea of quantum computers to model complex quantum systems. In October 2019, around 40 years later, Google AI and NASA scientists unveiled a quantum computer which ran an experiment in a few minutes that would take the fastest supercomputer 10,000 years. The quantum computer sped up the computation by a factor of 1 billion! This was one of the first major successes in the nascent field of quantum computing....

Introduction In this blog post, I will implement a few simple time series models of a stock price over time. I will also see how they do if we trade using them. We will look at moving averages (MA) and exponential moving averages (EMA). Data First, we need to download the price data. For this article, we will use SPY historical open price data. We can download this from Yahoo Finance....

Introduction This blog post will discuss the delivery options for someone who is short US Treasury (UST) futures contracts. During the last month of trading, the short “delivers” the USTs specified in the futures contract to the long. The short has various options when they make delivery of the treasuries. Understanding these options is interesting and important for anyone who trades UST futures and the UST basis. UST futures are some of the most liquid financial contracts in the world....

Why Exchange Clocks Matter In high frequency trading (HFT), time is literally money. An edge of a few microseconds could translate to millions in profits. The most popular markets for cash products (equity, bonds, etc.) are in New York (NYSE, Nasdaq), while the most popular futures and options market is in Chicago (CME). Since cash and futures influence each other, getting data between New York and Chicago as fast as possible is important....