Finance

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• Consumer Price Index (CPI)
  Last edited: 2024-01-10

  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the government backed measure of inflation in the United Kingdom (UK) . It is calculated monthly by the Bank of England . In the middle of the month the Bank of England collects the prices of 700 different items from 120,000 different retail outlets. Then it uses these to establish the cost of these product. (It was not clear to me which average was used here.) Then they take a weighted (by average use) Geometric mean of these prices to see the cost of living. (“The Geometric mean was used instead of the Arithmetic mean to exaggerate items at the lowest levels.” Don’t really understand what they mean by this.) This is normalised by that cost of the basket at the beginning of the index.

• How I think about work
  Last edited: 2026-02-05

  Several things in life have prompted me to think more deliberately about work: doing a master’s degree while working (stressful), reading The 4-Hour Work Week, diving into Stoic and Taoist philosophy, and getting turned down for a promotion.

  So I think it’s time to do some thinking on paper and see what comes out!

  Health warning

  I am in a position where I have a solid foundation (have done a PhD), have enough of a job history to feel safe about finding the next one - so what comes next is pretty entitled but that is the way the world is structured right now.

• Man Group
  Last edited: 2026-01-28

  # Overview

  As a Software Engineer at Man Group , I work within the Codex team, which operates the primary alternative data onboarding platform for the company. Our platform manages hundreds of ETL pipelines running daily that support critical trading strategies.

  # Technical Environment

  Platform & Tools

• My thoughts about a startup
  Last edited: 2025-07-05

  I’m at a crossroads and thinking about what comes next in my career.

  My journey so far: I did a PhD in Maths, which I loved for the intellectual freedom but found the culture of “love maths, do it all the time” a bit unhealthy. After that, I wanted to do good (‘do good’ really means control it and shape it the way I think it should be) in the world and moved to the UK government, which I found technophobic - my skills felt like they would atrophy rather than flourish. Then I moved to a scale-up but found the leadership toxic, with a CEO who thought it was better for members of the leadership team to fight it out rather than build consensus. Currently I work at a hedge fund which has a fairly free tech culture but is very corporate finance focused.

• Retail Price Index (RPI)
  Last edited: 2024-01-10

  The retail price index is an old measure of inflation in the United Kingdom (UK) that is no longer used by the government or the Bank of England . It is a Price Index , a weighted Arithmetic mean products prices that the average household would buy (including Mortgage repayments) to indicate a change in the cost of living over time. It’s use has now been replaced by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) . The main differences were