. Louisa Catharina .

Hi, 👋 I am Louisa. I am from Munich, Germany originally but I've been living in the US for 10+ years now. I'm currently living in San Jose, California after I've spend a couple of years in Indiana and Minnesota.

This homepage is dedicated to my two passions in life: my sport (equestrian vaulting) and investing 🤑.

👉 follow me on Instagram @LouisaCatharina19 for more pics & videos!

👉 check out my professional homepage and make sure to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to know what I'm doing for a living (I'm an engineer).

Thanks for stopping by 💜

. Equestrian Vaulting .

My Sport 💜

Equestrian Vaulting is basically "gymnastics on horses". And I am talking about real horses - the animal (as opposed to the gymnastic equipment "horse"). Hence the name - Equestrian Vaulting. In my opinion, it has a lot more in common with gymastics than with actual horseback riding. As vaulters, we do not control the horse - that is done by the lunger who is standing in the center of the cirlce. We just hop on & off the horse and vault on it :)

What happens if you fall?

My favorite question. My usual answer: "well, then you'll be on the ground again." On a serious note - we're athletes. We're trained to fall "correctly". And mostly we don't "fall" - we loose balance. I compare it to the balance beam in gymastics - you don't fall down like a sack of potatoes. You just loose balance. It happens quite often, especially if you are working on new moves. You have to play around and try shifting your weight until you can balance a move. And sometimes it is too much in either direction, and you slide/fall off. When that happens, you know it was too much in the wrong direction. You get back up and try again.

Isn't that dangerous?

Well, it's a sport. In my 20+ years in this sport, the worst I've seen are torn ACLs. And those injuries aren't the horses fault, they're mainly caused by bad landing on uneven footing. Like I've said before - we're athletes and are trained to fall.

You will get tons of bruises, and sometime you don't even know where they come from. We call it #maroonglory. It happens. It's a competitive sport.

Do you need your own horse?

No. I don't own a horse, and I never have (my parents gave up and settled for a cat instead). Usually the clubs have horses for all vaulters to share, depending on the skill level of each individual athlete.

Does it have to be a specific breed?

No. The personality and the body type are important, but vaulting horses are not just "one" specific breed.

Why compete?

✔️ Its fun! You will be judged on your athletic performance, but also on the harmony with the horse, and the artistic element of it all (the music, choreography & your outfit).

✔️ It's a perfect way to gauge your training progress.

✔️ It's a motivation to stay fit! Conditioning is a big part of our practice, and if you want to improve then there's no way around it!

✔️ You gain confidence.

✔️ You learn to push your boundaries.

✔️ You start doing things you thought you never could.

✔️ You conquer your fears and anxieties.

✔️ You learn to perform under pressure/stress (in a good way). The show must go on - even if you srew up.

How much do you practice?

I practice 2x per week on the horse, plus 1x on the barrel. In addition, I aim for conditioning workouts 5-6x per week. Sundays is the designated day off.

Of course, other people train differently. It depends on your skill level, age, what your goals are and what you want to achieve.

Try it ‼️

If you want to try this wonderful sport, check out the American Vaulting Homepage. Click on "FIND A CLUB" to see who's in your area.

If you are local (Bay Area, CA), head over to the Mount Eden Vaulting Homepage and come check us out!

. Investing .

I started getting interested in investing when I started my first job after graduating grad school. As part of my compensation, I got company stock - and quite frankly, I had no idea what to do with it. I kind of understood that it was "extra" money, but that was it. I didn't know anything about my 401-k until after I got divorced. I remember thinking "wow, where is all this money coming from?" until I realized some years earlier I must have signed up somewhere to contribute a part of my salary to my 401-k. I had no clue. That was my "aha-momement", and I deceided to join an Investment Club to finally take charge of my finances.

If you want to get started as well, a good point of reference is the Better Investing Community. Click on "explore investment clubs" to get started & find a club near you.

Fast-forward a couple of years, I'm a member of two different Investment Clubs, and have co-authored two articles in Stocks & Commodities (a magizine for Technical Analysis): "A Unified Theory Of The Markets" and a follow-up aricle, "A Unified Theory Of The Markets: RSI and Dynamic Clip Levels".

Besides the BetterInvesting tools, I use Stockcharts a lot. It's an amazing tool to do visual ("technical") analysis and, most importantly, you can download the data 😀 In my limited amount of free time, I use Matlab to write code to improve our model (every trading day I get new data, so I keep optimizing it). I also use JMP a lot if I just want to create quick plots and/or do some statistical analysis from my data sets. Being an engineer turned out to be very helpful when looking at stock market data. 😁