Social Security

I will tend to avoid talking about politics on here, but this came up in my email today and I find this a great read (actually, eventually I will be talking about many of the things on this guy's site, it is all interesting to read there).

From the site:

So, how realistic is the Social Security Trustees Middle Projection assumption on what the US GDP will be 27 years from now?

There is a (0.911121914 - 0.48167789) / 0.138352754 = 3.10397886261 standard deviation chance of it-or a chance of 0.000954684857590260, (about a tenth of a percent,) which is about one chance in a thousand, that the US GDP, 27 years from now, will be as bad, or worse, than their assumption.

A very conservative assumption, indeed.

Once our data feed series and we have something up and working again, one of the first things I will be talking about is the Brownian motion discussion which is all over the place on John's site.

Posted by ESS at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Overconfidence

Over at Travis Morien's site, he has a little blurb up on overconfidence in regards to trading the market.

Travis is a financial planner and in that little blurb he raises some excellent points - as he does in many sections of his site. He references many well known books and investing gurus.

It is a good little read to occasionally refer back to. Were I to jump up and down and wave my arms around more, trying to appear more confident and telling you how these formulas are a sure thing - maybe I'd have more readers.
But I'm instead going to keep going through the discussion of the analysis and then formal testing so that we can look and see what works and what doesn't.

I will warn you though that for the most part, you are going to see that technical indicators don't really work. There are some that do, but probably not in the way that you are thinking. We can get to this and more once the free data feed series is resolved and we can then write code to analyze the data that we have and test which technical indicators, if any, actually work.
There are many people who will jump up and down and wave their arms and say that if you are saying indicator XYZ doesn't work, then you aren't using it correctly. They very well may be right, but be careful those people aren't overconfident in nothing more than apophenia.

Posted by ESS at 03:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Feedburner

For those of you that are aware of RSS feeds, you may have subscribed to our site and been enjoying the full text feed that we offer. For those of you that haven't - now is your chance.

One of the upsides of an RSS feed is that you can provide a "light" path for your users who want to get your posts, but don't necessarily want to visit the site everyday.

One of the downsides is that the person/people running the site offering said feed doesn't get a good idea of how many people are reading the feed if they aren't visiting the site (as you may or may not have noticed, we have a few counter/tracker things in place to see what sort of traffic we get).

Well, thanks to the very cool Feedburner service, we can now track the RSS readership. What this means for you is really nothing - you don't have to worry about changing your links or RSS feed - I handled that on the server side with a mod_rewrite reference which points all RSS feeds towards Feedburner. It is also smart enough to format all RSS and Atom versions appropriately for your browser, and it even fancies it up a bit so that if you view the XML in a browser, it should be human readable.
I have also updated the ping service for Stensland Systems updates to notify Feedburner when there are new updates, so it should always have the proper and updated feed.

All in all, a great service.

If Feedburner stops behaving properly, I can simply remove the feed redirects and instantly you (assuming you are pointing to our local feeds), will go back to getting the feed we publish locally.

Also, as you can see at the top of this post, and also in the sidebar, there is a counter for the feed. As more people use it and refresh their feeds, then we can get a more accurate assessment of how many people are hitting the feed. (still not entirely clear how often that updates)

The nerd in me rejoices.

Posted by ESS at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

RSS feed back up again

I've added an RSS 2.0 feed back again for the site. Feel free to use that for your daily updates.

(I had taken it down some time back, but I think it is a great feature for any site - so please feel free to use it)

Posted by ESS at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Free Data Feed: Updated ticker listing

I downloaded the OTC tickers with that new URL, renamed that file to "OTC.csv" and then imported that into Excel. From there I pulled out the tickers, added them to the end of my "tickers.xls" file (which is a long list of the tickers all combined). Then I copied those all into a text file and saved it out and reran the "stipTickers.pl" script against it (that script is the one which looks for characters that aren't letters and removes that ticker).

Two things to note from doing that:

1) When I pasted them into a text document, I am on a Mac, so I just double-clicked the old tickers file and pasted in the new data over that. When I double-clicked, it defaulted to TextEdit. When I saved that out, it must have worked some Mac "magic" on it, and it put a Mac newline character at the end ("^M"). When I ran the script, it saw that as one very long line with an illegal character and it deleted it all. I checked via the command line this was the case and then in order to fix this I pasted the data back in via BBEdit, which is much better about acting properly and not forcing Mac things around (there are many ways around this, that was the way I chose to go).

2) I ran the script again after that and we can now note that here are the before and after figures:
Before: 11780
After: 11000

So now we have an even 11K stock tickers that we are going to look at and try to get data for, and update their data at the end of the day (late at night actually).

So the next part coming in the series is going to be how to automate it all in a way that we can start getting data in, but we won't hammer the Yahoo servers. Readjusting our storage requirements to somewhere between 600 and 700MB.
In order to automate, we can essentially use the scripts which we already have, we just have to put in full paths so that when they are run by a cronjob, it will know where to look. Some might argue that had we put in the full paths from the start, we wouldn't need to go back and change this. That is completely and totally correct - but I know from my own experience on my server that this way is easier with this setup in terms of explaining it to someone else.

So stay tuned and hopefully learn something along the way.

Posted by ESS at 06:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)