We've had a busy few weeks! After diligently preparing, Danielle and I boarded a plane to San Francisco and set out to explore the US. After a long 22 hour flight, with stop overs in El Salvador and Lima, we touched down in San Francisco at 3am on Monday 4th.

We spent the next week in San Francisco, Menlo Park and Palo Alto familiarizing ourselves with the SF BART and Cal Train making trips all over the Bay Area. We were lucky enough to meet half a dozen top tier venture capitalists, and learnt enormous amounts about our pitching and potential difficulties with implementing QuantConnect. Thankfully on the first day we made a trip to the Kiwi Landing Pad - a service for New Zealanders to get orientated in the Valley. Of course as part of the full kiwi service there was afternoon beer and chips with the Australians. We felt at home already.

We spent a lot of the downtime in University Cafe in Palo Alto meeting amazing people completely by chance. On Wednesday there was an investor wearing a Stock-Twits shirt with two people pitching to him. When they were done, I rush over and grabbed his arm and gave him a 30 second pitch. It went well and after we had finished, someone sitting to the left had overheard the whole conversation - it happened to be the head of the New Zealand Venture Fund! It was great to bump into such an extensive network of fellow New Zealanders in the Valley.

The Bay Area was beautiful, modern and filled with incredible people but sadly, after a long week with good friends we set off to New York. Danielle had lived in New York for five years before coming to Chile so has an extensive network there and we were lucky enough to meet people from the Wall St Journal, traders in banks, a quant from Goldman Sachs and a professor of finance. A lot of these meetings happened after market hours, with wine or beer, and many were amazing New Zealanders through introductions from the Kiwi Landing Pad.

Overall it was great validation and feedback from the traders and quants who resoundingly wanted to see the system come to success, and gave us extra motivation to succeed. One of the strongest requests was from professional day-traders who are getting edged out of the market by algorithms. After a long, long two weeks running around 14 hours per day we finally crashed and got some Korean in Korea Town, NYC.

We're getting back to the grind now, and aim to get the weekly releases back on track. Next update Friday 29th!