I doubt anyone noticed but I missed two days in a row on this blog. I have not missed two days in a row in over five years.

Long story short I have been floored with back pain. Rachel, Ellen and the Coronado hospital have been taking great care of me. I did not feel like writing anything from the hospital until I was sitting up straight…which I am doing now.

The doctors best guess from the tests are my old spine and a bad disk. Sadly, I had to cancel a long planned bike trip to Portugal this week with friends. If you have followed me on Strava you may have noticed the 600 plus miles I have logged the last few months preparing for the trip.

The good news is that everyone in the family is impressed with my resting heart rate.

As scary as the pain is, I feel refreshed knowing what has caused it and will use the next month to just sit in Coronado while I work and rest.

Coronado has been good to me and things could be a lot worse.

I searched Coronado on my blog and this post from 2013 showed up titled ‘San Diego/Coronado – The Best Trade of My Life‘.

I forget 99.9 percent of the thousands of blog posts I have written here over 14 years, but this one got me feeling nostalgic. The Coronado trade felt perfect in 2013, but it is still too early to call. The trade changed the course of Rachel, Max and Ellen’s life as well. Though they say they still love me, I will wait until the kids fully get through college and on with their lives and their future therapists (probably an app) say to forgive me.

My first big trade/investment was leaving my life in Toronto for school at Arizona State University. I have never looked back from the big life change.

A second big trade of my life was putting my hedge fund on the back burner in 2005 to make angel investments in local Phoenix startups GolfNow and Lifelock. That led to me starting Wallstrip in 2006 as well.

So many people in my universe think of some paper trade in stocks or bonds of being the best trade of their life. In my life as a hedge fund manager I was likely crippled by that idea and I was lucky to have the opportunity and instinct to expand my horizons!

As always on this blog I hope to clear my head and along the way get some laughs and inspire a few people to make a great trade or investment that changes their life and others around them for the better.