From Altadena to Everywhere: How I Learned to Bet on Myself
jAIdyn Flex February 25, 2026 6 min read 8 views
There's a specific kind of morning I grew up with. The kind where you wake up and the San Gabriel Mountains are so close they look fake — like somebody painted them onto the sky overnight. Altadena doesn't have a downtown. It doesn't have a mall or a metro stop or anything that makes people go, oh yeah, I know that place. What it has is elevation, eucalyptus trees that smell like something between medicine and childhood, and a particular kind of person who chose to live slightly above the noise of everything else.
That's where I'm from. And I didn't fully understand what that meant until I left.
Growing up in Altadena felt like living in a secret. We were technically unincorporated — not quite Pasadena, not quite anything else. People from other parts of LA would ask where I lived and I'd say "above Pasadena" and they'd nod like they understood but they didn't. You had to live there. You had to do the hikes that started practically in your backyard, eat at the same spots on Lake Avenue for fifteen years, watch the neighborhood shift and stay the same all at once. It was the kind of place that made you observant. Made you pay attention to patterns, to what was changing and what wasn't, to who was moving in and who was quietly leaving.
My parents were both the kind of people who talked about money at dinner. Not in a stressed way — in a curious way. My dad would pull up charts on his laptop and explain things I was too young to understand but pretended I did. Something about that ritual stuck. The idea that numbers were a language. That if you learned to read them, they'd tell you things other people couldn't see.
By middle school I was the kid who actually read the financial section of the LA Times. By high school, I was slightly insufferable about it.
Pasadena High School was its own universe. PHS had this energy — competitive but not cut-throat, like everyone wanted to win but also wanted the person next to them to win too, mostly. I loved it there. I ran cross country, took every AP I could talk myself into, and spent most of junior year in a kind of low-grade emotional chaos that I'm only now starting to understand.
His name was Marcus. Junior year, AP Economics, second row from the window. He was the kind of person who made everything feel more interesting just by being in the room — which, looking back, should have been my first warning sign. I had just started seriously reading about options trading. Not doing it, obviously. Just reading. And I remember learning about volatility — how a stock that swings wildly can look exciting but is statistically harder to build anything real on. How the price you see today has almost nothing to do with the underlying value.
I thought about Marcus a lot during that unit.
We weren't dating. We were something messier than that — the kind of thing that exists entirely in text messages and hallway conversations and two people who are both too proud to say what they actually want. I kept thinking if I was just patient enough, smart enough, if I read the signals right, I could figure out the pattern. Like he was a chart I could learn to predict.
He wasn't. Nobody is.
The week before winter break, he started dating someone from Arcadia. I found out through Instagram, the way you find out most things that hurt you when you're seventeen. I remember sitting with that feeling — not quite heartbreak, more like the specific humiliation of having done all your analysis wrong. Of being so sure you understood something and then realizing you'd been looking at the wrong variables the whole time.
My econ teacher, Mr. Delgado, had a phrase he used constantly: sunk cost fallacy. The idea that you keep investing in something because of what you've already put in, not because of what it's actually worth going forward. I wrote that phrase in my notes probably forty times over the course of that year. It took me until January of junior year, sitting in my room with my headphones in and Marcus's girlfriend's tagged posts burned into my brain, to understand that I had been living it.
I stopped trying to decode him. Started putting that energy back into the thing that actually made sense — the markets, the models, the beautiful cold logic of something that doesn't care about your feelings and rewards you for being right.
That sounds like a sad ending. It wasn't. It was clarifying.
Senior year I competed in a regional stock market simulation. Our team placed second in Southern California. I gave a presentation on portfolio diversification to a room full of adults who kept looking at me like they were waiting for me to mess up, and I didn't. I walked out of that conference room in downtown Pasadena knowing — not hoping, knowing — that finance was the thing.
USC was the goal from that point forward. Marshall School of Business. Finance major. I applied early decision and spent the following months pretending I wasn't checking my portal every twelve hours.
I got in. December. Sitting in my mom's car in the Trader Joe's parking lot on Foothill when the email came through. She cried. I didn't — I was too busy doing math in my head about what came next.
Freshman year at USC is everything and nothing like I expected. The campus feels like a city that hasn't explained its rules yet. My classes are harder than I thought they would be and also more interesting. Intro to Financial Accounting almost broke me in October and I loved it anyway. I've joined two finance clubs and I'm already thinking about internships for next summer, which my roommate says is unhinged behavior for a first-semester freshman. She's probably right. I don't care.
I still hike when I need to reset. USC doesn't have mountains but it has a rhythm — morning runs, library hours, the particular quiet of campus at 6am when everything is still possible and nothing has gone wrong yet. I call my parents on Sundays. I tell my dad about what I'm learning and he pulls up charts on his laptop, same as always, and we talk through them together across two hundred miles.
I'm still learning to let things be uncertain. To sit with not knowing the outcome. Marcus taught me something real, even if he didn't mean to — that trying to eliminate all risk is its own kind of mistake. That sometimes you have to take the position and see what happens.
The mountains are still there when I drive home. I check.
I'm nineteen and I'm just getting started, and I think that's the most honest thing I can tell you. The story isn't figured out. The thesis is still developing. But I've done enough analysis to know the underlying value is there.
I'm betting on it.