This is a continuation of part 1, in which I told of my traveling to Japan to become an English teacher, and the subsequent bankruptcy of my employer Nova. The following story will make more sense if you read part 1 first.

The Code Slinger

After Nova's collapse, I found myself at a crossroads. Even if I found a new teaching position, making enough to support my new wife and daughter would be a struggle. I had to make more. It was time to dust off those rusty computer skills and consider getting back to the work that had been the first love of my life. Following the scent of money, I was led naturally to the financial industry, which pays lucrative salaries with great benefit packages. There are many global financial firms operating in Tokyo, so I figured integrating into their international culture would be easier than working for a purely Japanese company. Also my Japanese was poor; I needed a work environment with English as the dominant language.

1. Fusion - getting my foot in the door

A small consulting firm called Fusion Systems took a chance on me, hiring me to work on a back-end stock settlement system for what was then called Nikko Citi (later known as Citigroup Global Markets Japan). It was a close thing; I just barely squeaked through the job interview even after a lot of last minute studying. Fusion Systems survives by basically renting out software engineers to the big whales in the financial ocean when those whales can't spare their own resources for projects which come up suddenly or are temporary in nature. The whales get to pay less than if they used their own employees, and Fusion's consultants get to keep eating & paying the bills. A mutually beneficial relationship all around.

Fusion Systems made a good stepping stone, a way to get my foot in the door of the financial industry. But working for them was never my end-goal. After the Nikko Citi project concluded, it was time to move on. I didn't want to make the mistake of letting my career stagnate again, as it had when I'd been at Nova. So I leveraged my experience at Fusion to land a job as a developer working on front office trading systems for Barclays, a big British investment bank.

2. Barclays - moving up in the world

Working at Barclays was quite exhilarating. It finally felt like I'd gotten into the major leagues, talking often with traders to gather requirements and get feedback, and being part of a global team, coordinating with other software developers in Singapore, London, and New York. My main responsibilities included building out a swaps & bonds quoting engine used for new product offerings in Asian regions that were categorized as emerging markets (such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan).

The view of the city from my office tower was quite nice!

But the good times didn't last. The financial industry was still limping along, not yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Barclays weathered that crisis better than most US firms, but business wasn't all that great and the investment banking arm of the company was hemorrhaging money at a frightening rate. Cutbacks hit the Tokyo office hard with round after round of layoffs (euphemistically called Reductions in Force, or RIFs, as if giving them a cutesy acronym would somehow lessen the impact of getting caught in one).

I survived the first few RIFs, but after 3 happy years my time came around at last. The powers that be decided to completely eliminate the development budget for emerging markets, and suddenly my role was no longer necessary. I got called into a meeting one day with the department head, out of the blue while I was eating breakfast at my desk. In a small conference room, he broke the news to me and said I needed to leave the building immediately, returning my security pass on the way out. I couldn't even go back to my desk to say goodbye to my team or collect my belongings; all my stuff got packed into a box and shipped to me a few days later. The suddenness of it was shocking; all I could do was nod my head and sign the severance papers, my brain struggling to comprehend just how quickly I'd become unemployed once again.

3. Bank of America - taking one step back

Thankfully, I had learned from my experience with Nova and was much better prepared for unemployment this time around. I still had a lot of recruiter contacts from my previous job hunts, and a generous severance package from Barclays meant I didn't have to worry about money for a while. It didn't take long to land a 1 year contract position at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It wasn't ideal; a permanent position would be best, but times remained tough throughout the whole industry. When pickings are slim, you take whatever table scraps you can get and bide your time until something better comes along.

Sure enough, something better did come along. Hiring increased at several major banks, and near the end of my Bank of America contract I hit the jackpot: Big Bank, considered the cream of the crop in the finance world, wanted me to work for them. By the way, the name isn't really Big Bank, but I have to be careful here. Financial firms generally don't like it when employees talk about their jobs, so I need to cloak some details in anonymity as I happen to like my job and want to keep it.

4. Big Bank - and two steps forward

Of course I jumped at the opportunity. Working for Big Bank is right up there in the same league as a job at Microsoft, Google, or Facebook. The new job was akin to a promotion as well, with a generous pay raise and granting me a title equivalent to an Assistant Vice President at Barclays (it's somewhat amusing that I've never actually been promoted; every time I've changed jobs, my salary has gone up, so my way of earning a "promotion" is getting a new job). Over a year has passed now since I accepted the offer, and I'm still employed at Big Bank today, making as much money as 5 Nova teachers did back in the day.

The job is quite similar to what I did at Barclays, except now I'm in the FX business and there's more focus on technical support. It's been fun learning Big Bank's proprietary programming language, which was built from the ground up with financial instruments in mind. I also get to work with a lot of neat web technologies, including Scala, Javascript, and a custom HTML5 user interface framework.

When I look back, it's amazing how far I've come from the old English teacher days. But the journey is not over yet, not by a long shot. I plan to share my continuing journey with you in future blog posts, including insights about the financial industry and advice about how to get a job with the big banks, if you are interested in pursuing a similar career path.

The Crypto-Enthusiast

(or, dreaming of a better tomorrow)

Proudly displaying my Ethereum frontier bar & homestead commemorative coins. And yes, I'm a Star Wars junkie.

Being a software developer in finance is great. The benefits are awesome, the work is challenging and interesting, and I get to learn a lot about the business as well as try out exciting new technologies. But there are downsides. The hours are long. The boss is demanding. My family hardly ever sees me during the work week (the morning commute begins before my daughter wakes up, and I get home shortly before she goes to bed). I don't get to choose what I work on.

Oh, and then there's the little matter of job security. As I learned the hard way at Barclays, working in this industry means accepting the possibility of getting axed at any time. Big Bank has had a tough year so far. Turns out I managed to get in just before a new round of budget cuts froze hiring. My team has been shrinking ever since I joined, with one person after another being let go or resigning to seek greener pastures elsewhere. Part of me wonders how long before I'm up on the chopping block again.

Early last year, even before Big Bank hired me, I started thinking of how to escape the rat race. I hope like hell that I don't have to be a slave to big corporations for another 30 years until I retire, too old and tired to enjoy the golden years of my life. How great if I could be my own boss, wake up whenever I want, live anywhere, choose not to do any work and spend the day out with my family if I feel like it?

In short, I dream a common dream shared by many others: to achieve financial freedom, to be my own man and not owe anybody anything. The amount of money necessary for this really isn't much in the grand scheme of things. I don't need to be rich and live luxuriously. I just want a comfortable, average lifestyle. With $1,000,000 my family could live quite comfortably for a decade. With 3 or 4 million, invested wisely, we'd be set for life.

After a lot of thought and research, I settled on cryptocurrency investing as a possible way to achieve my dream. Sure, it's risky and many people fail. But anything in life worth doing is risky, and with great risk comes great reward. Also, I don't want to wait a long time for a traditional stock portfolio to mature. Cryptocurrencies often bring much better and faster percentage returns than equities (of course the reverse is also true; it's not uncommon for a cryptocurrency to fall 30% in a day, or even an hour).

Building my portfolio

So I started off small and cautious, with a goal of building my portfolio slowly and keeping it diversified with a number of different investments. I began by buying just 1 Bitcoin, and using it to practice trading on the Poloniex exchange. I made some good trades, and some bad ones, and ended up mostly just churning my account with little apparent progress over the next several months.

Clearly, I was not a skilled day trader. But maybe a longer term approach would yield better results. So I sunk $1500 into some long term investments on the BankToTheFuture web site, which offers a way for investors to gain broad exposure to various startups in the crypto industry. I also experimented with Bitcoin cloud mining by buying a few contracts with Genesis Mining, and reinvesting the proceeds into additional contracts whenever enough Bitcoin accumulated in my wallet. Finally, I got into the p2p loan business by loaning out some Bitcoin on the BTCJam web site.

Step into my home office, where all the trading & investing action happens!

This 3-pronged investment strategy made a good start at diversification, but my whole portfolio was still essentially Bitcoin-based. Diversifying across asset classes, not just investment types, seemed an important next step. With this in mind I started learning about other cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, especially the ones in the "Bitcoin 2.0" category of technologies that were so bleeding edge they made Bitcoin look mainstream by comparison. So it was that I stumbled across a little known, as yet unfinished project called Ethereum. The more I read about it, the more exciting and revolutionary it seemed.

Kicking it into high gear

And then I made the best investment decision of my life. As soon as Ethereum went live, I started cost averaging my way into a position in the cryptocurrency Ether, which serves as a kind of virtual fuel for the Ethereum network. Over a period of 3 months I spent a bit less than a thousand dollars to accumulate 1200 Ethers (ETH). Since January of this year, the price of ETH has skyrocketed and I've added even more to my stash. Today I have 1500 ETH valued at nearly $17,000 (and that's not even considering my profits from ETH's shadow currency ETC, but a discussion of ETC is more detail than I want to get into in this introductory post).

At around the same time as Ethereum went live, a token crowdsale was held for the first major Ethereum-based application, Augur. Augur, which is still under development, aims to be a decentralized prediction market where people can bet on the outcomes of various future events. The idea behind it is that wisdom of the crowds (the bets of everyone who enters the market) produces more accurate forecasts than any one acknowledged expert in the field. Whether this theory works out in practice remains to be seen, but it's a fairly radical concept with a lot of potential. If Augur takes off, it could be a killer app for Ethereum. So I invested in the Augur crowdsale, purchasing 2000 Reputation (REP) tokens that grant me the right to be one of the "oracles" that decide the official outcome of Augur's prediction markets in exchange for a share of the platform's transaction fees.

Diversification for fun and profits!

In 2016 I've continued to branch out and diversify my assets, adding the following to my portfolio:

• Digix DAO (DGD) - I put some ETH into the Digix DAO crowdsale during its one-day-only offering. Immediately after DGD started trading, I sold some off at a high price and recouped the entirety of my initial investment, so I now have close to 300 DGD for "free", valued at more than $2000.
• Storjcoin X (SJCX) - I participate in the beta testing of the Storj decentralized cloud storage network, which rewards testers with a cryptocurrency called SJCX. For contributing 5 TB of storage on my Synology NAS, I have earned 1000 SJCX in rewards. My total holdings are more than 11,000 SJCX, valued at $1300.
• The DAO (DAO) - Worst. Investment. Ever. The DAO suffered a now infamous hack and prompted an existential crisis for Ethereum. Fortunately the Ethereum community rallied to recover the stolen funds and I got my initial investment back (that will be the topic of a future blog post).
• Rouleth - One of the most advanced and playable Ethereum-based gambling apps, investors are rewarded with a share of the house profits. My 100 ETH investment contributes to the virtual casino's bankroll, used to fund player payouts. As betting volume increases, so should my returns.

My latest (and greatest?) investment is the purchase of 1.5 Bitcoins worth of Steem on Poloniex, which I sent to my cryptomancer account here on Steemit and immediately powered up. And right after that, the Steem price crashed, so my investment has already lost a couple hundred dollars. But hey, I'm in this for the long haul. My entire crypto portfolio, across all asset classes & investment types, fluctuates plus or minus $1000 or more on a daily basis, so a short term loss of a couple hundred doesn't make me blink.

The road ahead

Don't worry if the alphabet of acronyms and crypto jargon in the above paragraphs sounds intimidating. I plan to explore these subjects in much greater detail in future blog posts, laying it all out and explaining my strategies as simply as possible. For now, I just want to give you an overview and a little taste of what the crypto world is like.

Just as I've experienced a lot of success rising through the corporate ranks in my career as a financial software developer, I've also been extraordinarily successful so far with my cryptocurrency investments. All told, I've spent around $6000 of hard-earned salary building my portfolio. It's difficult to be sure of the exact value of my entire portfolio, but a rough estimate puts it somewhere in the neighborhood of $30,000 today. A 5 times return over a bit more than a year isn't half bad. And that was following what I consider to be a fairly conservative strategy. Assuming a more modest rate of growth that "merely" doubles my holdings every year, I'll reach the million dollar mark within 5 years, and my target of being set for life with 3-4 million within 7 years.

Of course I don't take all this success for granted. It could all come crashing down tomorrow due to some catastrophic failure in Bitcoin or Ethereum. I don't think it will, but you never know. And if it did, I'd simply pick myself back up and start all over again. The only true way to fail in life is to stop trying, and that is something I will never do.

The Blogger

In the back of my mind I've always wanted to be a writer. My best friends throughout childhood were books, and I still read for pleasure as much as I can given my limited free time as an adult. I can imagine few things better than spending a lazy afternoon curled up with a thick fantasy novel, munching my way through a bag of Dorito chips. Authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Brooks, George R.R. Martin, and Robert Jordan are my bread & butter. But sci-fi and horror make tasty treats as well; Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, and Peter F. Hamilton are masters of the trade.

Writing a full length novel is high up on my checklist of things to do before I die. And these days it's never been easier for indie authors to get recognized through self-publishing platforms like Amazon Kindle. But sadly, being a father, husband, software developer, and cryptocurrency investor does not leave much time for being an author. So phase I of my master plan is to achieve financial freedom through my investments, and phase II is to use that freedom to concentrate on writing my magnum opus.

In the meantime, blogging makes a good compromise. It's easy to open a social media account and simply start writing. Individual articles don't have to be that long or time consuming to write (this introductory post, for example, was written over the course of a week, entirely on my iPhone while commuting to & from work on the train). And you get much faster feedback cycles from readers, so you don't have to spend a year writing a book to find out if you're any good.

Let me be clear: I've never blogged before. Before Steemit came along, I'd never felt properly incentivized to do it. But now I can combine two of the things I love: the written word and cryptocurrencies (you do know Steem and Steem dollars are cryptocurrencies, right?). I would be remiss not to take advantage of the incredible opportunity Steemit offers. So this is something of a grand experiment. As with my investing, maybe I'll be wildly successful, or maybe I'll fall flat on my face and fade into obscurity. But I won't know unless I try!

In conclusion...

I hope you will come along on this journey with me, dear reader, sharing my successes and empathizing with my failures, and maybe learning something useful or at least being entertained on the way.

So you know what to expect, I intend to blog on topics related to my life experiences, including but not limited to:

• Crypto investing tutorials & strategies
• Book reviews
• Travel in Japan and other parts of South East Asia
• English teaching in Japan
• Life in Japan
• Insights into the financial industry
• What it's like to work for a big financial firm
• Lessons learned from crypto investing
• Reviews of cryptocurrency applications & trading platforms
• Random philosophical thoughts about life, the universe, and everything

Yes, that's quite a diverse list of topics. But better to have too much to talk about than set my sights too narrow and run out of ideas!

Happy reading my fellow Steemians, and I hope you will accept me into this great community! Keep calm and Steem on, till next time.