From a Smuggled Commodore 64 to a Hedge Fund

On the evening of November 17, 1989, I was sitting in front of a Commodore 64 in the center of Prague, trying to visualize mathematical equations in BASIC.

The computer itself was a small miracle. In communist Czechoslovakia you couldn’t just buy one — ours had been smuggled across the border by a family friend, for a hefty premium, and we kept it half-secret. The secret police didn’t look kindly on things “from the West.”

That night I couldn’t focus. Something was in the air — an almost electric tension I couldn’t explain. I stepped onto the balcony to breathe, and I froze: the Velvet Revolution had just begun in the streets below.

Two revolutions started that year. My country’s — and, though I wouldn’t understand it for years, my own. The fifteen-year-old staring at that screen believed computers could one day be a tool for freedom. He just had no idea the road would lead through the futures markets, thousands of automated breakout strategies, and eventually a hedge fund.

This is the story I tell in full in my book — how growing up behind the Iron Curtain shaped everything I believe about breaking out: in markets, and in life.

Tomas