Optimize for investments or salary

My time is limited and in my spare hours, I've been trying to write code to better understand the stock market. My current work involves understanding stock options, which are quite the beast. I've so far gotten as far as writing parsers to get information form the internet and have gone as far as running monte-carlo simulations based on a variety of models but the problem is that I really don't know if these these models are correct and the more I code to create models,  the more I realize the less I know about modelling the stock market.

There is just so much on my own that I will be able to figure out on my own... then I thought about buying some advanced books to read. Then it hit me, I've got a lot of learning to do and I started to wonder if my efforts in this field would be worthwhile.

It is now also the end of 2011, meaning that my expenses spreadsheet for the year is nearly complete and I have a good idea of how much I've spent and saved for the year. Since moving out of the company dorms and into my own apartment, housing costs for me have skyrocketed and the amount saved dropped by about 33% compared to last year. This is even accounting for increases in salary. But the thing is that doing more research in stock picking may increase my investment returns by a few more percentage points. This begs the question, would I be better off investing that time in developing better skills to raise my salary?

Thus, I've started doing more research into engineering salaries and pay for jobs that I could possibly do and for jobs around the world. Thanks to the exchange rate between the yen and the dollar, the numbers look pretty good, but this is after a lot of overtime pay and travel pay that I got this year. On a dollars/hour basis, I don't think that the hourly salary was all that good.

Been Busy

Been really busy the last month and a bit to do any real writing, but a lot has been going on and I haven't had much of a chance to do much writing as of late. I've been flying between Tokyo and Kagoshima nearly weekly to help out with setting up an inspection machine and writing code to speed up the processes. Also, getting paid travel expenses and a small stipend is marginally nice.

On another note, I got a better than usual work review...after all was said and done, however, the better review led to only about a $600 increase in my winter bonus. The software I wrote cut down processing time by about 5 days and gave us more time to analyze data to improve the success rate of the process. If ouput and pay were plotted, the graph would be very sub-linear for the place where I work.

More notes to follow at a later time.