{"id":30627,"date":"2018-07-02T08:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/?p=30627"},"modified":"2019-10-24T09:53:58","modified_gmt":"2019-10-24T13:53:58","slug":"luiz-pereira-skating-into-a-business-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/2018\/07\/luiz-pereira-skating-into-a-business-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Luiz Pereira: Skating into a business future."},"content":{"rendered":"

Many talented and enthusiastic students attend Florida International University\u2019s College of Business. But few can look back and reminisce about life as a world-class figure skater \u2013 and have the YouTube videos<\/a> to prove it.<\/p>\n

\"Luiz
Luiz Pereira<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That\u2019s part of what sets Luiz Pereira apart. Skating under the name Luiz Manella, he represented his native Brazil in the Nebelhorn Trophy, and missed qualifying for the Olympics by a whisker. But when a series of injuries sidelined those ambitions, he brought the energy and discipline that propelled him to skating\u2019s top ranks to his college career.<\/p>\n

At FIU Business<\/a>, Pereira served on the Dean\u2019s Student Advisory Board and, until recently, worked as a fellow in the SunTrust FIU Financial Wellness Clinic<\/a>. He also joined FIU\u2019s chapters of ALPFA (Association of Latino Professionals in Finance and Accounting) and the Phoenician Investment Fund.<\/p>\n

To help connect students with higher math, computing and financial skills, Pereira started a student organization, NextGen Investments, that focuses on finding different trading approaches to financial markets. It is geared toward students in math, computer science, engineering, finance and economics, coaching them on modelling market relationships and predicting market patterns.<\/p>\n

From training to test-taking. <\/em><\/p>\n

When he started at FIU in 2013, while still training as a skater, \u201cI was a good student, but I didn\u2019t enjoy school,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to be a professional figure skater.\u201d<\/p>\n

He began preparing for that career at age 12, training in South Florida a few years after he and his family moved from Brazil to Miami to join his father, who had already moved at least a year prior. He first went to a rink to play hockey, but the prospect of working on jumps drew him in, and he landed his first triple axel and quad jumps at 17 and 18 (changed to 17-18).<\/p>\n

The skating life was demanding. \u201cI missed out on birthdays, I haven\u2019t had a summer off since I was 12,\u201d he said. He worked with top coaches, toured the world, and was on track for a spot for the 2014 Winter Olympics when an injury took him off the ice. He recovered, and four years later, he had been paired with a talented South Korea skater and was on the road to the 2018 winter Olympics when a detached ligament derailed his plans.<\/p>\n

At that point, he moved his focus to school. It took him a while to find his academic feet. \u201cI hopped around majors for a bit,\u201d he said, noting he considered engineering and criminal justice before choosing finance.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wanted the opportunity to be constantly engaged, constantly changing, not working on the same thing all the time. The stock market provides that–it\u2019s never static.\u201d<\/p>\n

FIU Business Assistant Professor Yeonju Jang helped him see how important advanced mathematics is in finance. He is working on a dual degree in applied math and finance and expects to graduate in 2019.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Pereira, along with his best friend Nicolas Bautista, started a company called Algo-nomics, which automates research for retail stock traders. \u201cWe code the strategies, and users customize them,\u201d explained Pereira. \u00a0\u201cRetail traders don\u2019t have the time to do research. We\u2019ve written code that looks at patterns based on user input.\u201d A mobile application sends a smart phone message when it\u2019s time to buy, and the user can decide whether or not to make a trade. It\u2019s expected to be launched within a year.<\/p>\n

Pereira says the lessons he learned from skating have been invaluable in his life as a student and entrepreneur.<\/p>\n

\u201cSkating gave me discipline and maturity,\u201d he said. \u201cThey are broad words, but it boils down to work ethic, discipline and passion. Are you willing to give up everything for what you are doing?\u201d he said, noting that such habits aren\u2019t easy to master–but doing so pays off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many talented and enthusiastic students attend Florida International University\u2019s College of Business. But few can look back and reminisce about life as a world-class figure skater \u2013 and have the YouTube videos to prove it. That\u2019s part of what sets Luiz Pereira apart. Skating under the name Luiz Manella, he represented his native Brazil in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":30635,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[3903,4333,4331],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30627"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30627"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33447,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30627\/revisions\/33447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biznews.fiu.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}