Why I Traded Trading on Wall St for the Terminal (And Why You Should Care)
Speaking from experience, most people think leaving a Hedge Fund to write code is career suicide. They see it as trading the penthouse for the plumbing.
They are wrong.
In the hierarchy of leverage, the “plumber” who builds the pipes owns the water supply. The banker is just renting a bucket.
I didn’t leave finance because I hated money. I left because I realized that traditional finance is just data engineering with bad tools.
Here is the autopsy of my pivot from allocating capital to writing syntax.
The Latency of “High Finance”
I spent years in the trenches of Wall Street. I co-founded a hedge fund. By all external metrics (AUM, prestige, network) I “made it.”
But looking at the architecture of the industry with an engineer’s eye, I saw a system plagued by massive inefficiencies.
My days weren’t spent on high-level strategy. They were spent in “Excel Hell.” I was manually aggregating CSVs, cleaning dirty datasets, and copy-pasting values between spreadsheets to feed a fragile model that would break if a single cell was formatted as text instead of a number.
I realized a terrifying truth: I wasn’t an investor or an allocator. I was a human API.
I was a high-cost, high-latency middleware layer moving data from point A to point B. And I was scalable only by adding more hours to my day or more bodies to the room.
That is Linear Leverage. And it sucks.
Results = Time × Labor
If I stopped working, the output stopped. If I wanted 2x the output, I needed 2x the analysts. In the world of systems, this is a bottleneck.
I was the bottleneck. I needed leverage.
So I went hunting for it.
Code Leverage
The pivot happened when I started automating my workflows. I picked up Python not out of curiosity, but out of frustration.
I wrote a script to parse financial statements. What took a junior analyst 10 hours, the script did in 4 seconds.
The analyst makes errors → the script does not.
The analyst needs sleep → the script runs 24/7.
The analyst costs $180k/year → the script costs nothing to replicate and $.0000001 to run
This was my “Red Pill” moment.
I realized that Code is Permissionless Leverage and how rare that is in comparison to the other drivers of leverage.
Labor Leverage: You need people to say “yes” to working for you. You have to manage egos, payroll, and culture.
Capital Leverage: You need SFOs or LPs or VCs or PEs or some other wealthy combination of letters to say “yes” to giving you money. You have to manage anxiety, reporting, and drawdowns.
Code Leverage: You need no one’s permission. You write the logic, you deploy the container, and the machine works.
Wealth is not a number. Wealth is a system that runs without you.
The Arbitrage of Skill
There is a massive arbitrage opportunity right now at the intersection of Domain Expertise and Technical Execution.
Most developers do not understand the intricacies of a P&L statement, RevOps, or capital allocation. Most financiers do not understand how to spin up a Docker container, fine-tune an LLM, or architect a clean data pipeline.
By sitting in the middle and becoming the “Architect of Leverage” I unlocked asymmetric upside.
When I build a system now, whether it’s for McDonagh Technologies or my Single-Family Office, I am not trading time for money. I am investing time to build an asset that generates returns in perpetuity.
I treat my life like a software stack:
Infrastructure: My health and environment.
Backend: My automated workflows and investment algorithms.
Frontend: The strategic decisions I make based on the data my backend serves me.
Why This Matters to You
You do not need to be a hedge fund manager to apply this. You just need to stop viewing your work as a series of tasks and start viewing it as a system architecture.
If you are manually sending emails, you are the bottleneck. If you are manually aggregating data, you are the bottleneck. If your revenue is tied strictly to your presence, you have zero leverage.
The Rat Race is designed for linear thinkers. It rewards you for input. The System is designed for exponential thinkers. It rewards you for throughput.
I quit banking to write code because I wanted sovereignty. I wanted to own the means of production, not just manage the capital that rents it.
Code is the closest thing we have to magic.
Code is the ability to speak a language that creates value out of thin air, replicates infinitely at zero marginal cost, and serves you while you sleep.
Don’t just work hard. Build a machine that works hard for you.
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