The following changelog captures the internal changes the gold and silver, Bitcoin and dogecoin, and other forecasting model updates or deprecation. This information is for reader and subscriber updates and deployed to markets.neuralmarkettrends.com Version 0.3.1 May 3, 2023: Updated 5 day, 4 week, and 6 month forecast charts with bokeh generated images. Added in auto support and resistance lines to charts. May 3, 2023: Redeployed Bitcoing and Dogecoin forecast models and charts.

I recently abandoned WordPress (again) for Hugo CMS on Dreamhost. This is the simplest and cheapest solution I’ve found for deploying Hugo CMS based sites on a reliable and affordable host. I’ve been a user of Dreamhost for over 15 years and here’s how I hyperscale Hugo CMS based niche websites and Dreamhost for profit. **Disclosure:** Some of the links I'm this article are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission.

This short post is just a way to get my thoughts down on “paper” about using Hugo to hyper-scale niche websites. I’ve been researching niche websites and their ability to capture niche traffic to generate passive income. Yes, the name of the game is to build up a net monthly passive income of around $10,000. To get to that level of income I need to find a niche topic that will allow me to capture long-tail keyword traffic, then monetize each page, and optimize SEO.

This tutorial will show you how many followers you should expect in the coming days and weeks using the Facebook Prophet (FBProphet) python package. This is a perfect example of what python can be used for. You can use it to forecast your medium followers or sales revenues. It can be any time series related problem, but first you must install FBProphet. Install FBProphet My code is simple, and the FB Prophet documentation is written very well.

In this week’s Data Science and Machine Learning link round-up, we’ll share some links that caught our (my) eye during the past few weeks.

Here’s what I say, feel free to fork it. Feel free to build whatever “consortium” you want, but it’s going to be a futile effort. You won’t be able to use the original name in your forked product or service, so you won’t get brand recognition. You won’t have an in-depth understanding of the codebase or the years of experience that the developers, maintainers, and makers have

Massive tornadoes ripped through a big portion of the Heartland a few days ago. The fact that we’re having tornadoes in December is for another post altogether but the travesty in all this is the needless deaths of workers that weren’t allowed to protect themselves. Despite the advance notice by weather forecasters about the impending dangerous weather, many owners kept their employees working. Over 76 people are confirmed killed that night, an estimated 70 alone in Kentucky with a majority of the dead coming from a candle company owned by Mayfield Consumer Products.

I’m evaluating whether or not I should move this blog to another CMS platform so I can start building a community around it like it was before. Right now this blog runs on Hugo and AWS Amplify and it’s freaking awesome. I push new posts to GitHub, AWS pulls the changes and rebuilds the site, and then I can look at make sure it looks fine before I merge into master.

I shut Neural Market Trends down on the last day of August thinking it was going to be for good. Things have changed on my end and I’m thinking of restarting this site. I’m thinking of moving back to my roots and building a community. Why? Because of something I saw a few days ago. I was on a work call the other day and a prospect was sharing his screen.

I’m coming up on my 3rd anniversary at H2O.ai and we’ve embarked on an interesting pivot of sorts. Our new product is based on Kubernetes. At first I thought Kubernetes is just another buzz word and a way for the Cloud providers to extract more money from users, but I’ve come to realize that it’s not. Of course, there are pros and cons with Kuberentes, it’s new and isn’t widely adopted by organizations as of yet, but it’s neat from a container isolation and scalablity standpoint.

There was a big news sensation about Burger King workers quitting en masse in Lincoln, Nebraska. All 11 Burger King employees quit because: “We became essential,” Johnson said. “And then we weren’t treated essential by upper management.” From what was reported, they had to endure 8-hour shifts without breaks in very hot conditions. One employee was even hospitalized for dehydration, and then was called a ‘baby’ by management. WTF. The funny thing is that we hear the standard empty motivational tripe that you’re so essential, and you’re so valuable to us.

Work from home (WFH) is here to stay if you’re lucky and fight for it. I keep hearing from my customers that more and more companies are starting to reopen and call back employees to the office, except many are not coming back! That’s music to my ears! After dealing with the sudden pandemic shutdowns, juggling work-home duties, and dealing with the isolation, the majority of American workers powered through this hell.

I’ve stopped posting about my various investments that I use to generate passive income because no one cares. Sure they want to find out some ideas but there’s plenty of ideas to glean from StockTwits or Reddit forums. Right now everyone is focused on the meme stocks like $BB or $GME, but those are flashes in the pan. Just the normal noise in the market every day. I’m doing pretty damn great for 2021.

I’m still in awe watching retail traders en masse push these stocks to highs or even new highs. It all started with Gamestock (GME) a few months ago and I was lucky enough to ride the wave for two days and GTFO. My wife wanted a piece of the action, despite my warnings, and bought a few shares at $350. It went to $500 in pre-market trading the next day and then promptly collapsed.

In April 2020 my blog was barely alive. I had moved to Hugo from Pelican and ignored any kind of SEO optimization for it. I thought it was stupid and that the best content would win. Little did I know that my content wasn’t even being found! So after thinking about it for a few short minutes, I decided to dive back into SEO and figure out how to bring my blog back from the dead.

Notes from the Video Matt Dancho, founder of Business Science Introduced to H2O-3 via the AutoML package Sample code in R shared Sample forecasting project / Walmart Sales Tidymodels standardize machine learning packages Modeltime loads H2O Multiple time series Create a forecast time horizon, assess 52 weeks forecast Create preprocessing steps, helps the H2O algos to find good features Some columns are normalized from the pre-processing Extracted Time related features (i.

Just like what I did with my general H2O-3 Tutorials, I’m starting a seperate H2O Wave Tutorial post for you all here. I will add to this as I go along and build more apps. Stock Chart Generator Wave App This is a simple candlestick chart generator that defaults to JNJ when you load it. All you need to do is add your Alphavantage API key where it says "apikey": "XXXXXXX" } #ENTER YOUR ALPHAVANTAGE KEY HERE

There are many reasons why I hold AT&T ($T) for my passive income goals. The first one is that it was around during the Great Depression and the second, it will probably be around during the next Great Depression. I can be pretty sure that AT&T will weather the storm if another future event like the Great Depression strikes the markets. Sure, all the stocks will drop in price, including the ones with dividends, but think of those skyrocketing dividend yields!

I’m done with my Medium vs Adsense experiment here. This is all part of a passive income strategy evaluation game I’m playing. I’m trying to see if I can build a $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. I know it will take time but I like playing these kind of games. Right now I’m evaluating a mix of different things such as dividend-producing stocks, web monetization, and Adsense. So far for February, Adsense is beating the pants off my Medium income.

I recently set had to set up H2O’s Wave Server on AWS Lightsail and build a simple Wave App as a Proof of Concept. If you’ve never heard of H2O Wave then your been missing out on a new cool app development framework. We use it at H2O to build AI-based apps and you can too, or use it for all other kinds of interactive applications. It’s like Django or Streamlit, but better and faster to build and deploy.

This tutorial is not about porting Hugo posts to the Ghost format but instead it’s about how I got a custom domain, CDN, and removed the :80 port from a new Ghost install. First off, setting up the machine on AWS Lightsail is pretty easy. It was as simple as selecting the Ghost install and taking the cheapest instance possible. I think the cost is like $3.50 a month, which is pretty sweet IMHO.

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk lately about the Roaring 20’s and how they’re here now. I guess people are seeing a market near all-time records and are getting scared. Is 1929 right around the corner? Should you buy now? Sell? …and by passive I don’t mean lazy. What a great question! You know that there’s no right or wrong answer here. What’s my advice? Read this book (affiliate link) and then go do your favorite hobby.

This is my second monthly report on how my passive income journey to $100,000 a year is working. This month my passive income was a lot lower. QYLD didn’t have a dividend payout and RYLD’s payout is happening tomorrow. However, my Adsense experiment and Medium produced the most non-dividend income. The downside was that it wasn’t enough to exceed last month’s total income. Overall, I expect there to be blips and bumps along this $100,000 journey and that’s ok.

Today is the day I want to write about Johnson and Johnson ($JNJ) and why I’m holding it for the long term. One, it’s a well-established company that cranks out great products that everyone uses, and two it has amazing dividends. For each share of JNJ, you get $4.04 of dividends per year. JNJ hits all the sweet spots for building my $100,000 a year passive income portfolio. Let’s dig a bit deeper as to why.

Building a dividend producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance while the music was played. - Alan Watts I struggled with where to publish this article. Part of me wanted to post this to my regular blog Neural Market Trends because it’s where I’m writing about this particular subject a lot. The other part of me thought it would be best to share it on Medium with a larger audience.

Gamestop ($GME) has been in the news a lot lately and I’ve written three articles about it on Medium. It’s been an amazing thing to watch, the short squeeze that took short-seller Melvin Capital down (allegedly) and how crazy the r/WallStreetBets group is. I admit that I traded on all the activity and I made a tidy profit but I considered my success due to sheer luck and being at the right place at the right time.

Today I’m writing a short but important post for myself. It’s to assess how my passive income strategies are working and if I’m on track to building up a $100,000 passive income a year portfolio? Considering I ‘accidentally’ made $800 of dividends last year in my taxable account, I wanted to see if I could build up enough passive income before I retire at 59. Yes, I’m on track to retire by 59!

I continue to collect dividend producing stocks and ETFs on my journey to generate $100,000 a year in Passive Income. Earlier this month I picked up $RYLD, another covered call writing ETF that invests primarily in the Russell 2000. This one has a higher Beta though, so I’m taking on more risk but I’ve kept my initial purchase small. Stock Price RYLD is trading at its all-time highs. Everyone is thinking the Bull Market is getting a bit long in the tooth and are starting to wonder when the Biden bump will fade away.

My quest continues to earn $100,000 passive income in a year. Supporting my strategy is $QYLD, a monthly dividend producing ETF that uses a Covered Call strategy by owning and selling Nasdaq 100 stocks. It’s not one for the faint of heart, but it fits with my passive income strategy and I went long. There are two things that jump out at me risk wise. For my readers, I’ve written covered calls before, and they’re a great strategy to amp up your returns.

I added $GILT to my passive income portfolio at the beginning of 2021. I did it because the ex-dividend date was on 1/8/2021 and I saw that it had a low price with a history of big dividend payouts. Albeit it is a short dividend history. I’ve written that my goal is to build up a passive income portfolio. My measure of success will be when I generate a $100,000 a year income, and right now GILT is part of that strategy.

I spent the first week of 2021 reacquainting myself with Dividend Reinvesting and I’ve concluded that it makes a ton of sense for someone like me. Retirement isn’t here yet but I can see it coming on the horizon. I’d need to think about stabilizing my investments against volatility and start thinking of long term income. When I first started investing I put a small amount of money in Dividend Reinvestment Plans (still long INTC, thank you very much) and focused on growth inside my retirement accounts.

Building a dividend-producing passive income portfolio requires thought, time, and education. Today I’m sharing 5 tips for building a successful dividend passive income portfolio and how you can figure out the right strategy for you. As I’ve written before, this idea came to me after my wife and I reviewed her 401k at the end of 2020. She had by accident generated a large sum of dividends without even trying. This was the same for me in my 401k as well and we generated $800 in dividends by accident in our trading account.

2020! What a crazy year! We had the Covid19 pandemic, major economic shocks, two big IPO’s in the immediate ‘AI’ space, and lots of new machine learning libraries and innovation. Right now there are so many startups in so many different niche markets or services that it’s hard to count. I’ll highlight the ones that I stumbled across. First is Spell.ml. A buddy of mine ended up there and clued me into what they do.

I travel a lot for work, or rather I used to until Covid19 hit. My last work related trip was to Florida to a convention on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). I stayed in a beautiful Hilton Hotel near a marina with a great resturant and bar. I’ve been a long time Hilton Honors member and use the AMEX credit card a lot to gain points, status, and rewards. My Hilton Honors came in handy when my family and I were stranded overnight in Miami because flights were cancelled due to a nasty storm.

I invested in Terra Tech Corp (TRTC) back in January 2018. Marijuana / Cannabis type stocks were making big moves back then and this company looked like it would capitalize on it. At the time it was trading around the $4 to $5 range and I picked up 200+ shares of it for about $4.82. Since then I watched it do a reverse stock split and get put on the Pink Sheets.

Every year in November investors and traders look toward ‘Black Friday’ as a way to gauge how well the end of the year is going to go. Black Friday is the day that retailers and shops are supposed to finally make money for the year, due to heavy demand for ‘stuff.’ It’s too early to tell but I want it to be a good year. Wanting and what will happen are two different things in reality.

Now that Wall Street has accepted a Biden win, we’ll see more easing from the Fed and hopefully a great Santa Claus rally. That should be good news for stocks and for the ones in strong uptrends, it will be awesome! However for the ones in downtrends, well they get coal in their stockings. Here’s a tale of two worlds, NVIDIA’s performance vs Intel’s. Machine Learning and Data Science in general requires big computers to do data processing.

There was a short time when at a previous Startup I moved out of Sales and into Marketing. I had to produce a lot targeted content in a niche market and that’s how I earned my living. A lot of the content I created ended up on the company’s blog, video library, or community boards so I considered myself a Professional Blogger back then. Now that I’m back in Sales and I Blog here for fun, I consider myself a writer and a Semi-Professional Blogger now.

Talk about scummy, Facebook is getting nervous. NYU Researchers @LauraEdelson2 and Damon McCoy were sent a cease and desist letter into their research on how Facebook is targeting political ads. To say the least this is a very hot topic considering all the voter suppression and false information that led to the current Administration. At a minimum, this question SHOULD be asked and it SHOULD be answered to everyone’s satisfaction. Facebook, IMHO has become a tool for propoganda and manipulation.

This is my ongoing list of Python Tutorials. I’m currently merging my various Python Tutorials into one cohesive list below as a way to reduce the amount of posts all over my site. Thank you for your patience and please feel free to drop me a Tweet if you have any comments or questions. Learning Python Programming the Easy Way I picked up python programming when I needed to do something but couldn't figure out how to connect the dots.

Introduction to Driverless AI I finally posted a new video on my YouTube channel after a year of no activity. It felt good and is part of my ‘content refresh’ project I’m working on. In this video I do an introduction to Driverless AI and its EDA capabilities. The forthcoming videos will go into the training, testing, diagnostics, machine learning interpretability, and much more. Please drop a comment or question in the channel if you have any.

I’m going to start this post with a big helping of gratitude. I’m so grateful to the 1000’s of readers that helped me get into the field of Data Science and Machine Learning. I was a part-time blogger that turned my passion into a full-time gig in the AI Startup world. This post is my way of paying it forward to you. Read below if you want to learn how to make money blogging.

We are living in crazy times. The (Stock) Market is reaching all time highs when the rest of Main Street is falling apart. Amazon is trading in the $5,000 range and people think the market doesn’t represent the majority of us. I agree. The Market is NOT for Main Street and it will never be. It’s for a small group of the population that’s seeking to reallocate your funds to their account.

It would appear that making a rolling list of all my old and newer RapidMiner Tutorials would be helpful for readers. It should be noted that these tutorials and videos were made for differnet versions of RapidMiner (version 5 to 7) and may look a bit old and dated BUT they are still relevant to this day. The functionality of RapidMiner is still the same but the internal organization and look will be different.

My position on whether cryptocurrency is a fad or real changes from month to month. I had a hard time connecting the dots until recently. What changed? I discovered the Uphold Interledger. The Interledger is just what it sounds like, a ledger system between multiple currencies or ‘stores of value.’ It’s based on the distributed ledger that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have made famous. It allows you to easily convert between fiat and cryptocurrencies with a click of a button.

I’m no stranger to trying different CMS’s to see which one works best in terms of functionality, speed, and ease of SEO use. Over time - and many mistakes later - I’ve found that Hugo is the best for all three of those criteria. It’s very functional, fast to build, and easy to tweak for SEO. When you couple that together with the AWS backbone, you get a fast loading website where all the static builds happen automatically as soon as you update your Github repository.

I was on Twitter one day and I came across an announcement that HackerNoon had joined the micropayment world and gotten an infusion of cash from Coil.com. That’s a cool $1 million to implement a new method of web monetization. Breaking: We Raised $1M From @Coil, Will Stream Micropayments from Readers to Writers via the Browserhttps://t.co/iquXY9j2Pm pic.twitter.com/bHRfhaenna — HackerNoon | Learn Any Technology (@hackernoon) June 10, 2020 I think the current web monetizaztion model is broken and power is concentrated into too many corporate silos.

I made the switch over to Hugo a short while and love the fast builds. You can read all about me ‘crushing’ on it in my [What I Learned using Hugo](/hugo-static-cms/ post. There’s one main thing I want highlight in this post and it’s how to optimize Hugo for SEO. Hugo, just like any other CMS, is pretty good out of the box but you need to optimize it. Here are my Hugo SEO tips for optimization.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been a user of Dreamhost.com for over 15 years. It’s where I hosted my old blogs and registered my domains. I started with a basic hosting in the early days and switched over to a virtual private server (VPS) a few years ago because I need to run Cron jobs. **Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission.

As software continues to eat the world, we’re slowly becoming slaves to subscriptions. I don’t remember when I started thinking about this but it must’ve come up when I looked at our family budget. I realized that we as a family and I, are paying so much on monthly or yearly subscriptions that it just gives me great pause. What am I paying? On the surface, it doesn’t look like much but then you dig deeper and you realize you are hooked!

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time you’d know that I like to try different CMS’s. I made some mistakes over the years and I transferred my posts between different CMS. This ended up killing a lot of my backlinks, but that’s ok. I ended up settling on using Markdown to write my posts (love it) and a static CMS generator. Originally I used Pelican and it was pretty good.

Apple was a great winner for me. Too bad I sold it on April 1st but hindsight is always 20-20. I think I went long sometime back DecemberDecember 2018 when the share price was around $160-ish. I screwed up in my brokerage account and put it on margin and when the markets sold off at the end of February and the beginning of March 2020, I decided to take my profit.

I was once told that the best time to start a business is in a recession. The reasoning behind it is that the business would get stronger once the recession is over. Essentially you’re starting at the bottom and can only go up from there. From my experience, this is true. I’ve started several businesses over my life and have closed several businesses too. Some were better than others too. I (we) still have our real estate business but it’s morphed more from a real estate investing business to a holding company.

From the ‘sad news’ file, JC Penny is getting ready to file bankruptcy. That’s too bad. I remember JCP being one of those ‘stalwart’ companies I grew up with. Bradless, Woolworths, Rickles, Kmart, Sears. All of them are now dead, dying, or long gone. It’s a shame but my nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills for them and they have a lot of debt to pay back. When I think about it, why is that we operate on such an insane debt model?

I picked up a few shares of XLE yesterday. I figured it was beaten down enough and should revert back to the mean, hopefully around $60. Update: Now sold… Chart wise I see two things happening. First, I see a window was opened when XLE fell off the cliff in March. I should probably do the statistics on it but the general wisdom is that eventually this window would be shut.

I’m a reader of Reddit and I found a subreddit that makes me sad. It’s called r/WallStreetBets. Everyone is posting on how much money they make or lose from trading ‘stonks’ using put or call options. I ruminated about this in a video that I’m going to post soon. Everyone get’s making money confused with the real thing, time. You can’t make more time, you can always make more money.

We all went on our first cruise last year on Norwegian Cruise Lines (NCLH). S and I had a great time, our kids were bored. When my wife first proposed the idea of going on a cruise, I rejected it. I was like “why do I want to be cooped up on a floating metal coffin?” I was wrong, I had a blast of a time. The food was fantastic. There was so much to do for entertainment, and different port of calls were great too.

It’s Saturday and the month of April is almost over. It WAS Saturday when I started writing this but now it’s the last day of April. It’s been especially cold this April and the leaves aren’t even out on the trees where I live. That’s been a big bummer. There have been a few days this month that have been perfect Spring days and my body is ready for the warm weather.

Some of yesterday’s winners or most active should be no news to any who looks at the markets. Gilead Sciences announced some positive results working on Covid19 related drugs. Good, we need more stuff like this to get our lives back to normal. I don’t know about you but I’m getting stir crazy after being in ’lockdown’ for two months now. My chart generator is showing me that there’s only a support line down at $64, so congrats to all the stock pickers.

I don’t know where the market is going. Will it shrug off all this Covid19 pandemic or will it fall apart? I really don’t know. That’s the thing with the Markets, you can try to build all these decision support systems to predict if the market is going to go up or down, but that always remains such a futile effort. The only thing you can really do is protect yourself in down times and invest smartly for the long term.

Two years ago we moved to a new house in a very active social community. We were going to dinner parties at least once a month and my wife would usually bring a small dish and I would bring wine. This has been a lot of fun for everyone but I always hated running out to the store to get one or two bottles of wine. My new gig keeps me very busy and on the road, so the last thing I want to do run around looking for a good wine.

4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. That’s on top of the 22 million from the past 4 weeks. All the job gains for the last decade have been wiped out. Poof, gone in 5 weeks. The chart below is lagged by one week, so it’ll be much worse when a new chart is generated. States in the South and the MidWest States East of the Mississippi River are getting slammed.

The Oil markets are a really dumpster fire these days. With the Russian and Saudi oil wars going on the result has been a flood of oil in the markets. Prices collapsed for the May 2020 contract to -$37.63 a barrel. That’s nuts. I’m starting to see prices being pushed down at gas stations too. Since Covid19 put a damper of travel, I think well see sub $10 a barrel oil coming.

A few months ago I bought a Jetson Nano as a Christmas present for myself. I promptly got busy with work and life and forgot to set up until a month ago. I followed the instructions on how to flash the unit and got Ubuntu 18 up and running. That was the easy part, it was when I wanted to install Julia, TensorFlow, and Python where it got less easy.

I started playing bass guitar when I was in high school. The whole goal was to make our own music and get ‘chicks.’ I won’t lie, I was a horny teenager. Over the course of the years and through college, I played in heavy metal, punk, and improv music bands. I loved every minute of it. We recorded, played live gigs in New York City - even played at CBGB’s twice - and built up a small DIY following.

I posted about AutoML-zero in my newsletter a few weeks ago. I found genetic programming and applying evolutionary search for machine learning to be really powerful. Here’s another article referencing AutoML-zero and briefly talks about how AI is evolving with these approaches. The program discovers algorithms using a loose approximation of evolution. It starts by creating a population of 100 candidate algorithms by randomly combining mathematical operations. It then tests them on a simple task, such as an image recognition problem where it has to decide whether a picture shows a cat or a truck.

After 5 weeks of self isolation I’ve finally gotten a chance to think about a post Covid19 world. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that our lives, work, and society will change after this. The question is, will it be for better or worse? What follows is my stream of consciousness. Some things will be for the better. Companies that used to not support remote work will amend or change their policies.

I hope that this blog post finds all of my readers happy and healthy. It feels really strange having to write that because of all the death that’s descending upon us. Covid19 is really hitting my state (New Jersey) really hard. If you’ve been reading my newsletter, you’d know that we’ve been self-isolating for several weeks. It’s downright scary. There are some small silver linings to all this, I’ve heard from many friends that I haven’t heard from over the years.

I don’t remember how I found it but I learned about the Indie web from this blog post. The Indie Web is a movement to reclaim your authorship and blog from the clutches of corporations. It’s not a move back to the ‘good ol’ days’ rather a way of putting your data back into your hands. In other words, don’t be the product. As a Data Scientist, I process lots of data every day.

The markets have been in a complete freefall over the past few weeks. The likely culprit is Trump’s mishandling of the Covid-19 (aka Coronavirus) response and overinflated prices. Who knows what is the real market contagion here but I think it’s time to make a shopping list. With free falls in some of my favorite holdings (MSFT and AAPL), I can’t but help think it might be time to add to these long term holdings and buy more stuff like ETF’s and Mutual Funds.

I have had some time to continue on my Python Forex Trading Bot (code borrowed from here and tweaked by me) now that we’re all self isolating. This is purely for educational purposes because when I run this sucker, it loses money. Not so much anymore but it’s not profitable. The reason why I say ’educational purposes’ is that coding is not my first choice of career and I teach myself as I go along.

After a few frustrating events where I had some python code blow up because of dependencies, I started looking hard a using Groovy going forward. For some simple things, Groovy and Python are very easy. For example if I wanted to read the latest sales from Park.IO and print them out, I could do the following in Python on my Mac. import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('https://park.io/orders/export.csv') print (df) If I tried that on my old Raspberry Pi, I’d run into dependency issues w.

I was looking through Reddit the other day and came across an interesting post in r/Groovy. The group itself has been relatively dead for a while but sprang to life with a question about using Groovy for Data Science. Granted, Python IS eating the world right now for Data Science with R right behind it and Java still hanging out with all the Big Data stuff. I’ve always liked Groovy because it’s very Python like (high level-ish) but compiles down to byte-code during runtime.

Right before the New Year I posted an article on Medium titled “Is Passive Investing Going to Kill Us?” It centers around one particular chart where the amount of money flowing into passive investing is staggering. While I’m a big fan of Passive Investing and I’ve been riding its success, I can’t help but wonder if I was just plain lucky. I know that markets love to correct imbalances but the question is when?

Happy New Year readers! Granted it’s already 10 days into the new year but I’ve been having a well deserved break and easing back into work. Now that 2020 is here I hope to amp up more of what I did last year. Read more books, go to the Dojo/exercise more, and make more adventures with the family. I’m not really into the ’new year resolutions’ because I like to ease into things, not make abrupt cold turkey changes.

Yesterday Morgan Stanley announced a 2% reduction in workforce across the entire organization. It’s citing an “uncertain global environment.” That’s a code word for “recession” if you ask me. The job cuts at the investment bank, the world’s biggest equities trading firm and a leading mergers advisor, will hit technology and operations roles hardest, said the people, who declined to be named. New York-based Morgan Stanley had 60,532 employees as of Sept.

My colleague posted an interesting Princeton presentation to our group Slack channel. It’s about how AI is being used in social interactions such as hiring decisions. I completely get why HR departments and companies want to do this. They get 100’s of resumes from people and want to weed through the lot of them to get to the right candidates. This is how AI can help, optimizing processes to assist people to make the right decisions.

I just read that Lee Sedol is retiring from the competitive Go world because of AlphaGo. The South Korean said he had decided to retire after realizing: "I’m not at the top even if I become the number one." This is a bit sad but understandable. I wrote about Lee’s historic match with AlphaGo a while ago. He ended up losing four matches out of five, which was an ass-kicking for the #1 Go player in the world.

WOW! I posted this over 12 years ago. Talk about being spot on the money! I hate to do this but I’m going to quote myself here: I firmly believe that data mining, AI, and machine learning trading will accelerate over the years. Who knows, maybe my little model will move markets one day! :) As far as the trend in AI goes, it’s really getting started now. AI is being adopted by the next tier of companies.

I forgot to link to this image back in early May 2019. It’s from Bloomberg and it makes a lot of sense, maybe eye opening for some. Essentially it shows that the market is the be and end all. Of course the market is an average and there are funds or AI traders that beat the average, but others will underperform the average. Over time, your little ’edge’ will eventually underperform and you have to keep writing new code and new strategies.

Identifying stock market trends is like eating and drinking the Zeitgeist. It has to be inside you to understand it. You have to be social, go outside, go to parties, etc. If you’re not “hip” then you’ll never see emerging trends until they’re already established. Then it’s a matter of chasing their coattails and riding them for a bit. Years ago Howie had a great tag-line for his blog, it was “Trends… Find them, ride them and get off.

I’ve finally found a way to download SEC.GOV data in a consistent and less stressful way. I want to give the University of Notre Dame Software Repository for Accounting and Finance a shout out for their excellent work. Thanks to them I can finally start taming this beast. I’ve struggled for years trying to figure out how to download SEC data. That repository is so wacky that it’s hard to find filings in there.

Lately I’ve been reading Seneca as part of my exploration of Stoicism. There’s a lot of great things here and I recommend you check out the video and my notes below: To live well we must be constant students of life Seneca’s essay “On the shortness of life” reminds us that time is a non-renewable resource Treat time as a commodity, people guard their property but squander time The amount of time we get is uncertain, you could die at 20 or 100 Death creeps up on time wasters Make the most of time, it is an amplifier when used properly Don’t invest your time preparing for life Seneca pushes us to live right now and not to delay happiness Your typical life is work till 60 and then wait to be happy What usually happens is your old to enjoy life then and regret not making most of life Planning the big things in life but don’t delay living it Live life for your own self Being busy with things we don’t like is the greatest distraction of your life We waste time at jobs we don’t like, relationships we’re not happy in, etc Invest your time into making a life worth living Practice Premeditatio Malorum While you waste your time by procrastinating, life goes on Researchers call the dissonance of “short-term gratification vs long-term commitments” as time inconsistency To fight this, use Premeditatio Malorum which is a form of negative visualization Think of what could go wrong with your long term task and then make plans to achieve it.

On the heels of my last post, I’ve extended those functions to the EURUSD pair. The data starts from this year 2019 and goes through to yesterday. It’s actually a pretty neat script as it takes data from Onada and then generates the support and resistance lines for that particular pair. The next step would be to create a buy/sell order in the Oanda Practice Account. Once I do that it’s then a matter of writing a trading strategy and testing it in real time.

A new feature has been added to H2O-3 open source, isolation forests. I’ve always been a fan of understanding outliers and love using One Class SVM’s as a method, but the isolation forests appear to be better in finding outliers, in most cases. From the H2O.ai blog: There are multiple approaches to an unsupervised anomaly detection problem that try to exploit the differences between the properties of common and unique observations.

I’m back in Silicon Valley for a few days to attend our yearly Sales Engineering (SE) training. It’s a great way for the growing SE team to get together and talk shop. I find these yearly meetings very useful but they’re hectic. Fun but hectic. I love being on California. It’s such a wonderful place for the outdoors and ‘chilling’ in cities like San Francisco. I’m a big fan of the SoCal desert areas and Joshua Tree is one of my favorite destinations.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been blogging now for over 12 years. I’ve written 100’s of posts, some short and some long. I’ve had my shares of ups and downs here but in the end I’m glad I stuck with it. It’s made me realize that blogging has led to my personal growth. Blogging has become a career! What’s happened is that I’ve been reposting and repopulating old posts from my archive.

Q3 is over. It’s been over for a day already but it seems like it was a week ago. This has been one of the busiest Q3’s in my career as a Sales Engineer and I’m off to Montreal again. I’m visiting customers and turning some prospects into new customers. Q4 is going to be even crazier, but I enjoy this. The Sales life is strange when you think about it.

I just read this CNBC article that Ray Dalio is going long Gold. He believes that the markets are undergoing a paradigm shift and he might be right. The operative word is might. His fund’s been taking losses this year but appears to be recovering this July as gold perks up. Why is gold perking up? There’s a lot of economic and poltical uncertainity happening right now thanks to Trump, the Chinese Tariffs, and many other things.

I always need to be learning. If I’m not pushing myself out of my comfort zone or just plain learning ‘cool shit,’ I just get bored and cranky. This is one of the reasons why I love working at H2O.ai because I’m pushed everyday. Just this past week I was pushed into learning more deeply NLP and coding Python, two topics I’m very interested in. Along the way I’ve learn how to use Git better and solve some interesting use cases.

I want to share my experiences as a Real Estate Investor (REI) and expert in the engineering field as a way to help novice real estate buyers. My wife and I made a lot of mistakes when we started buying properties. Now, after a few years we’ve gotten it down and are ruthless when evaluating a property. We’ve bought a house from auction, written short sales documents for banks, bird dogged, and researched flood prone properties as a way to get smarter about being real estate investors.

It’s been a long time since I wrote anything related to Real Estate (RE), especially about flipping houses. I heard on Bloomberg yesterday that the real estate flippers are exiting the market as fast as they can because the real estate market is starting to slow down. That’s interesting news because of my personal history with RE. I have been a real estate investor that wanted to be a flipper but got caught in 2007 slowdown.

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. I recently picked up the late John Bogle’s book, “The Little Book of Common Sense Investing” and I plan on reading through it despite knowing the basic jist of it.

Last evening my colleague Navdeep Gill (@Navdeep_Gill_) posted a link to his latest talk titled “Interpretable Machine Learning with RSparkling.” Navdeep is part of our MLI team and has a wealth of experience to share about explaining black boxes with modern techniques like Shapley values and LIME. Machine Learning Interpretability (MLI) H2O has this awesome open source Big Data software called Sparkling Water. It’s similiar to RapidMiner’s Radoop but 1) open source, 2) more powerful, and 3) been tested by the masses.

I do a lot of traveling for work these days. I’m on a plane at least 5 times a month and have long stay overs at least once a month. I’m not complaining because this allows me to rack up those airline miles and other points as I work. I have to use my credit card because I don’t have an expense account, so I make sure to use the best credit cards for me to get airline miles and hotel points.

I’ve written about this countless times but I’m a big fan of passive investing in the markets. By doing less, I actually gain a lot more in returns. That’s all great and wonderful but currently it’s not ideal for me. What I really want to do is turn that passive investing into passive income. So even in their golden years, they have to budget carefully. Passive Investing != Passive Income What’s the deal with passive investing and what is passive income?

Back when I started blogging in 2005-ish, I had a few blogs that destructed due to bad software or databases. My Sixth World News and Commentary site just stopped working one day and I couldn’t recover any posts. I was a tech newbie so I didn’t know how to do SQL dumps and try to save over a years worth of work. Wordpress came along and changed all that by making blogging more robust and fun.

I found this short 8 minute video from H2O World about Machine Learning Interpretability (MLI). It’s given by Patrick Hall, the lead for building these capabilities in Driverless AI. My notes from the video are below: ML as an opaque black box is no longer the case Cracking the black box with LIME and Shapley Values Shapley Values won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012 After Driverless AI model runs, a dashboard is created Shows the complex feature engineered and the original features Global Shapley Values is like Feature Importance and includes negative and positive contributions Quickly identify what are the important features in the dataset Then go to Partial Dependence Plots, which are the average prediction of the model across different values of the feature Row by Row analysis of each feature can be done to understand interactions and generate reason codes Shapley is accurate for feature contribution, LIME is an approximation Done via stacked ensemble model Can be deployed via Python Scoring pipeline

I’ve been a long term shareholder of MSFT and I’ve been rewarded quite well. Under the leadership of CEO Nadella, Microsoft has become and AI powerhouse, and I believe he’ll win the cloud computing wars. Right now Amazon is the dominant player but based on what I see in Azure’s development, I think both companies will be ’neck to neck’ in a few short years. Investors have rewarded the stock with new highs and crossing (before retracing just below) a $1 Trillion dollar valuation.

The family and I took a cruise over Spring Break and had a blast. Even though I feel a bit out of place in these situations I still had fun. I was quite impressed by the quality of food, drink, and entertainment on these massive ships that S and I will consider doing another in the future, just sans kids. The kids had an OK time but the oldest spent all of her time drawing and my youngest spent his time in the arcade or between the kid’s pool and the general population pool.

Now this is something I can get behind, using machine learning to make Pesto tastier! The article is really about growing Basil with higher concentrations of volatile compounds that affect the taste, which in turn is the key ingredient in Pesto. The researchers behind the AI-optimized basil used machine learning to determine the growing conditions that would maximize the concentration of the volatile compounds responsible for basil’s flavor. The study appears in the journal PLOS One today.

I found this interesting article on Pocket about writing. The gist of it is that successful writing is about rituals. Every writer is different and the rituals are different, it’s all about finding out what works best for you. Location and physical environment also play a role in maintaining a sustained and productive workflow. Bob Dylan, for instance, extolled the virtues of being able to “put yourself in an environment where you can completely accept all the unconscious stuff that comes to you from your inner workings of your mind.

The r/investing sub cracks me up sometimes. This guy has had enough of the sub because all it spews is how great Buffet is and dollar cost averaging. If you ask me, all the things he complains about are good. ETF’s are good, low cost(ish), and easy to get in and out of. Dollar cost averaging has really helped me build a good size 401k nest egg but it required consistency and time.

I got a chance to watch this great presentation on the upcoming release of TensorFlow v2 by Martin Wicke. He goes over the big changes - and there’s a lot - plus how you can upgrade your earlier versions of TensorFlow to the new one. Let’s hope the new version is faster than before! My video notes are below: TensorFlow Since it’s release, TensorFlow (TF) has grown into a vibrant community Learned a lot on how people used TF Realized using TF can be painful You can do everything in TF but what is the best way TF 2.

I watched Mike Gualtieri’s keynote presentation from H2O World San Francisco (2019) and found it to be very insightful from a non-technical MBA type of way. The gist of the presentation is to really look at all the business connections to doing data science. It’s not just about the problem at hand but rather setting yourself up for success, and as he puts it, not getting fired! My notes from the video are below (emphasis mine):

Writers gonna write! February is shaping up to be a big traveling month for me. I was in Mountain View at the end of January for Sales Kick Off and then stayed for H2O World in San Francisco at the beginning of the month. Topping that off so far was a trip to Orlando for HIMSS last week. All incredible events but my traveling isn’t done yet! I plan to be all over the eastern seaboard in the coming week!

I’m spending time trying to understand the differences between writing classes and functions in Python. Which one is better and why? From what I’m gathering, a lot of people are tired of writing classes in general. Classes are used in Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and some python coders hate it because it’s writing too many lines of code when only a few really matter. So programmers like functional programming (FP) in python instead.

Dmitry Larko, Kaggle Grandmaster, and Senior Data Scientist at H2O.ai goes into depth on how to apply feature engineering in general and in Driverless AI. This video is over a year old and the version of Driverless AI shown is in beta form. The current version is much more developed today. This is by far one of the best videos I’ve seen on the topic of feature engineering, not because I work for H2O.

Arno, H2O’s CTO, gave a great 1+ hour overview in what’s new with Driverless AI version 1.4.1. If you check back in a few weeks/months, it’ll be even better. In all honesty, I have never seen a company innovate this fast. Below are my notes from the video: H2O-3 is the open source product Driverless AI is the commercial product Makes Feature Engineering for you When you have Domain Knowledge, Feature Engineering can give you a huge lift Salary, Jon Title, Zip Code example What about people in this Zip Code, with # of cars >> generate mean of salaries Create out of fold estimates Don’t take your own prediction feature for training Writes in Python, CUDA and C++ is under the hood that Python directs Able to create good models in an automated way Driverless AI does not handle images Handles strings, numbers, and categorial Can be 100’s of Gigabytes Creates 100’s of models with 1,000’s of new features Creates an ensemble model after its done Then creates a exportable model (Java runtime or Python) C++ version is being worked on All standalone models Connect with Python client or via the web browser Changelog is on docs.

There was a HUGE announcement on the Julia blog a few days ago. The convergence of a language for machine learning and marrying it with a compiler just got a bit closer. Julia announced Flux, a machine learning frame work for Julia. Julia Language started out with the goal to create a language that was elegant for computations (i.e. math and machine learning), easy to code, and can take advantage of all that a hardware can offer by a specialized compiler.

The best startups have a ‘Do It Yourself’ attitude. When a problem arises, no one get’s assigned the task to solve it. The team jumps right in and gets to work. There’s always a sense of ownership and a sense of pride. They build new things because it’s cool. They think of ways to make things better and make it happen. They are the ‘Makers’, and for lack of a better word, they make $hit happen.

Passive investing saved my life in many ways, but not in the way you think. It didn’t swing from the trees like Tarzan and snatch me away from a charging Rhino nor did it give me a Flu shot. It did it in two main ways: Saving my time and avoiding costly mistakes. How? Read on my friend, read on. I know many people that lived through the Real Estate boom and implosion in 2008.

This is my third startup. Or maybe my fourth, I’m not sure but it gets hazy after a while. What I do know is that if I ever do another startup, I’ll use open source to make it happen. Let me explain with a bit of back history. My most recent startup was a consulting business that I started in mid 2017. I had just resigned from another startup in the machine learning space and with their software I did Data Science and Engineering consulting for a handful of clients.

Writing. I have such a love hate relationship with it. I try to write things of interest to my readers but I’m struggling to reconcile what to write about it. So I focus on writing tips and the process. I love the process of writing so much that it gets in the way of actual writing sometimes. Damn. In order to share with my readers, I have to write. In order to write, I have to sit my butt in a chair and start writing.

Ray Dalio’s Pure Alpha Fund returned 14.6% for 2018. That’s an amazing feat considering the majority of hedge funds averaged a loss of 6.7%. How does he do it? Simple. He always asks, “how do I know I’m right?” The Westport, Connecticut-based firm is the world’s biggest hedge fund with about $160 billion in assets. The gains for its Pure Alpha Strategy came as other fund managers were whipsawed by volatile markets, resulting in the industry posting one of its worst years ever.

I’m going to preface this post by saying that lately I’ve been pretty emotional. I’m not sure why, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that in a few short years I’ll be a half century old. I’m starting to look around me and catch glimpses of my mortality in the rear view mirror. Oddly, it seems to be gaining on me every time I look.

For those that know me, I have a favorite saying. When I’m asked “how’re you doing?” I reply, “I’m living the dream.” Sometimes I get a chuckle, sometimes I get a sigh, and sometimes I get “Yah right, more like a nightmare.”

I’ve come to find that I can learn a lot about a person by how they answer this question.

Dear Friend, I’ve been meaning to write about the importance humility and equanimity in sales. From my personal past observations, it seems these are attributes only a few sales people have. What is humility and equanimity? Humility is defined as: “a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.” Equanimity is defined as: “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.” The Monkey Brain Recently I was enlightened by a sales colleague about the concept of the Monkey brain.

Overfitting and introducing bias during model training is always a big topic in data science. Typically you train a model using Cross Validation by creating a model on k-1 folds and test it on the remaining one fold. This one fold is the holdout set and will usually work very well if, and only if, the trained model is independent of the holdout set. Under normal situations, this works well, but you might begin to leak information into the model as the test fold changes.

Dear Friend, I’ve been think a lot about open source lately. I’ve also been thinking of closed source and open core too. All those words. What do they mean? Why does it sound so important and confusing at the same time? Selling AI I’m back in sales now and you can say that I sell ‘AI’. What a strange thing to say, sell AI. I help sell support and Driverless AI.

In this video the presenter goes over a new R package called ‘iML.’ This package has a lot of power when explaining global and local feature importance. These explanations are critical, especially in the health field and if your under GDPR regulations. Now, with the combination of Shapley, LIME, and partial dependence plots, you can figure out how the model works and why. I think we’ll see a lot of innovation in the ‘model interpretation’ space going forward.

For those that are wondering why I left RapidMiner, my dream job, there are no gory details to share. The simple reason is I got burnt out. My time at RapidMiner was some of the best learning and growth years in my entire professional career. I solved problems, made presentations to C-suite people, and worked with some of the best talent. The flipside of this was that it wasn’t easy and it sure as hell wasn’t a smooth ride.

I stumbled across an interested reddit post about using matrix factorization (MF) for imputing missing values. The original poster was trying to solve a complex time series that had missing values. The solution was to use matrix factorization to impute those missing values. Since I never heard of that application before, I got curious and searched the web for information. I came across this post using matrix factorization and Python to impute missing values.

I’m going to be the first to admit that I use Python to send out Tweets to my followers. I have a few scripts that parse RSS feeds and do retweets on an hourly basis. They work fine but they do get ‘gamed’ occasionally. That’s the problem with automation, isn’t it? Getting gamed can cause all kinds of havoc for your brand and reputation, so you have to be careful. Has this happened to me?

I found this talk to be fascinating. I’ve been a big fan of LIME but never really understood the details of how it works under the hood. I understood that it works on an observation by observation basis but I never knew that it permutates data, tests against the black box model, and then builds a simple linear model to explain it. Really cool. My notes are below the video.

I find this somewhat older post fascinating. It would appear that more and more millennials are waking up and realizing that there’s more to life than just overworking. Sure they get big $ but they’re burning out too. “I wanted to travel more — I didn’t want to have to ask for time off and grovel for extra days, you know?” says Solomon, now 25 and living in a rental house in Kauai, Hawaii, overlooking the beach.

A few years ago RapidMiner incorporated a fantastic open source library from H2O.ai. That gave the platform Deep Learning, GLM, and a GBT algos, something they were lacking for a long time. If you were to look at my usage statistics, I’d bet you’d see that the Deep Learning and GLM algos are my favorites. Just late last year H20.ai released their driverless.ai platform, an automated modeling platform that can scale easily to GPUs.

Continuing the stream of consciousness from my Working with Instgram API, JSONPath, and RapidMiner post, I started beta testing a new and improved Instagram Hashtag Tool. I’ve even opened it up to a few beta testers (ping me if you want to try it). It uses a RapidMiner Server on the backend to watch a Dropbox folder. Once you put a text file into the ‘In’ folder, it triggers a process and spits back a spreadsheet in the ‘Out’ folder.

While VC’s are a necessary part of growing a startup, they can kill it too. I’ve seen this happen too many times where the VC’s kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They’re so driven by financial goals that they interfere with great startups that just need a bit more time to ‘gel.’ A recent study commissioned by Eric Paley at Founder Collective found that by pressuring companies to scale prematurely, venture capitalists are indirectly responsible for more startup deaths than founder infighting, technical debt and slow customer adoption — combined.

This is the forward to an updated ultimate guide on getting started in data science. I wanted to write a set of ‘getting started’ posts to share with readers on how I became a data scientist at RapidMiner. How I went from a Civil Engineer with an MBA to working for an amazing startup. Granted, I’m not a classically trained Data Scientist, I hardly knew how to code in the beginning but with the right tools and attitude, you can ‘huff’ your way into this field.

Coming on the heels of “I told you so,” China is using facial recognition to make sure you’re a good Chinese citizen. Authorities in Shenzhen, China, have set up artificial intelligence-powered CCTV cameras to scan the faces of those who jaywalk at major intersections and display their identities on large LED screens for all to see. If that isn’t punishment enough, plans are now in place to link the current system with cellular technology, so offenders will also be sent a text message with a fine as soon as they are caught crossing the road against traffic lights.

When I first self-taught myself ‘data science,’ there wasn’t a lot on the Internet to help me. I spent years cobbling information together reading what I could find about it. Now, there’s a plethora of Data Science and Machine Learning education available. There’s forums, open source libraries and much much more. Most of it is free and damn good. There’s no better time for a non data scientist or machine learning wannabe to learn about it, if you want to put in the time in.

Good Morning, my name is Tom and I love the Millennial generation. I don’t love everyone or everything about them, but I love what they will become. Are they perfect? No! Do they ALL want the same thing, no? Are there exceptions to the rule? Of course. Yet, I can’t seem to follow along with my generation and call them lazy and entitled. After all, the Gen X’ers were called the “slacker generation,” and now we’re starting to run the world.

Good Morning. My name is Tom, it’s April 2018 and I’m done laying low. It’s time to download all this ‘stuff’ that’s been on my shoulders for so long. I feel like I’m just coming out of a long funk that has had the combined effects of burnout and a mild depression. Yes, I was/am burned out and mildly depressed. Why? It’s probably because of several tumultuous years, both professionally and personally.

Great article by Florian Cäsar on how his team developed a new machine learning framework. From scratch. In 491 steps! He summarizes the entire process up in this great quote: | *From images, text files, or your cat videos, bits are fed to the data pipeline that transforms them into usable data chunks and in turn to data sets,* | *which are then fed in small pieces to a trainer that manages all the training and passes it right on to the underlying neural network,* | *which consists of many underlying neural network layers connected through an arbitrarily linear or funky architecture,* | *which consist of many underlying neurons that form the smallest computational unit and are nudged in the right direction according to the trainer’s optimiser,* | *which takes the network and the transient training data in the shape of layer buffers, marks the parameters it can improve, runs every layer, and calculates a “how well did we do” score based on the calculated and correct answers from the supplied small pieces of the given dataset according to the optimiser’s settings, * | *which computes the gradient of every parameter with respect to the score and then nudges the individual neurons correspondingly,* | *which then is run again and again until the optimiser reports results that are good enough as set in a rich criteria and hook system,* | *which is based on global and local nested parameter-identifier-registries that contain the shared parameters and distribute them safely to all workers* | *which are the actual workhorses of the training process that do as their operator says using individual and separate mathematical backends, * | *which use the layer-defined placeholder computation graphs and put in the raw data and then execute it on their computational backend,* | *which are all also managed by the operator that distributes the worker’s work as needed and configured and also functions as a coordinator to the owning trainer,* | *which connects the network, the optimiser, the operator, the initialisers, * | *which tell the trainer with which distribution to initialise what parameters, which work similar to hooks that act as a bridge between them all and communicate with external things using the Sigma environment,* | *which is the container and laid-back manager to everything that also supplies and runs these external things called monitors, * | *which can be truly anything that makes us of the training data and* | *which finally display the learned funny cat image* | *… from the hooks from the workers from their operator from its assigned network from its dozens of layers from its millions of individual neurons derived from some data records from data chunks from data sets from data extractors.

Fascinating behind the scenes interview of StockTwit’s Senior Data Scientist Garrett Hoffman. He shares great tidbits on how StockTwits uses machine learning for sentiment analysis. I’ve summarized the highlights below: Idea generation is a huge barrier for active trading Next gen of traders uses social media to make decisions Garrett solves data problems and builds features for the StockTwits platform This includes: production data science, product analytics, and insights research Understanding social dynamics makes for a better user experience Focus is to understand social dynamics of StockTwits (ST) community Focuses on what’s happening inside the ST community ST’s market sentiment model helps users with decision making Users ’tag’ content for bullish or bearish classes Only 20 to 30% of content is tagged Using ST’s market sentiment model increases coverage to 100% For Data Science work, Python Stack is used Use: Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn Jupyter Notebooks for research and prototyping Flask for API deployment For Deep Learning, uses Tensorflow with AWS EC2 instances Can spin up GPU’s as needed Deep Learning methods used are Recurrent Neural Nets, Word2Vec, and Autoencoders Stays abreast of new machine learning techniques from blogs, conferences and Twitter Follows Twitter accounts from Google, Spotify, Apple, and small tech companies One area ST wants to improve on is DevOps around Data Science Bridge the gap between research/prototype phase and embedding it into tech stack for deployment Misconception that complex solutions are best Complexity ONLY ok if it leads to deeper insight Simple solutions are best Future long-term ideas: use AI around natural language

This is a great video presentation on Fraud Analytics use case with RapidMiner. See my notes below. ##Some key concepts More complex model, the lower the training error but higher test error. Simple models are better, try explaining them to children. Data Scientists understand the technical aspect, need to communicate results with analysts. Sell results to businesses. Tie $ to the results. Speak same language with business. Map performance metrics to business related figures.

The news dropped that Google’s new implementation of AlphaGo, called AlphaGO Zero, was able to learn completely on its own. No training set was first used, rather it built it’s own training set as it played against the older AlphaGO. Earlier versions of AlphaGo were taught to play the game using two methods. In the first, called supervised learning, researchers fed the program 100,000 top amateur Go games and taught it to imitate what it saw.

This is a great introduction to Deep Learning. I know I learned a few things from Phillip. Some key concepts RapidMiner now can do GPU deep learning. Supports NVIDIA. Easy: Using already loaded Neural Net operators. Harder: Using H20.ai Deep Learning operator. Hardest: Using Keras with RapidMiner. Keras requires more complex setup with RapidMiner. CNN, RNN, LSTM, etc are now available via RapidMiner GUI. Keras supports Tensorflow, CNTK, and Theano. Need Python v3.

I’ve been keeping a lazy eye on Orange over the years and it’s (fairly) recent update has made it quite an impressive contender in the Data Science visual platform space. While it’s not RapidMiner, it does have a lot of great things going for it. First, it’s entire core was rewritten to tightly integrate with Scikit-Learn and Python. It has a decent time series ‘add-on’ which comes stock with ARIMA. It has a really good Text Processing ‘add-on’ that gives the user more finer control that RapidMiner’s and it has a great GEO Map natively.

File this under “no shit Sherlock,” but hackers are already weaponizing machine learning. The AI, named SNAP_R, sent simulated spear-phishing tweets to over 800 users at a rate of 6.75 tweets per minute, luring 275 victims. By contrast, Forbes staff writer Thomas Fox-Brewster, who participated in the experiment, was only able to pump out 1.075 tweets a minute, making just 129 attempts and luring in just 49 users. via Gizmodo

One of the big corporate strategy things I worked on was developing and putting into production a PQL model. It was essentially a propensity to buy model that analyzed usage patterns on the RapidMiner software platform and bucketed new downloaders into those that were likely to buy or not buy. It was incredibly successful and helped the sales team focus on thier leads better. My former colleague Tom shares his thoughts on it since it’s been in production for over a year now.

An important lesson I’ve learned while working at a Startup is to do more of what works and jettison what doesn’t work, quickly. That’s the way to success, the rest is just noise and a waste of time. This lesson can be applied to everything in life. Data is your friend We generate data all the time, whether it’s captured in a database or spreadsheet, just by being alive you throw of data points.

A few months ago I read about a programmer that automated his job down to the point where the coffee machine would make him lattes! Despite the ethical quandary, I thought it was pretty cool to automate your job with scripts. Then I wondered, was it possible to automate data science? Or at least parts of it? This general question proved to be a rabbit hole of exploration. StackExchange has an ongoing discussion into another programmer’s automation of his tasks.

This is just nuts. Millennials just can’t seem to catch a break. Now AI is coming for their jobs. Research released by Gallup on Thursday indicates a collision between technology and “business as usual” is coming soon, and the fallout will be ugly, especially for Millennials. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are among the most disruptive forces descending upon the workplace, says the Gallup report, and 37% of Millennials “are at high risk of having their job replaced by automation, compared with 32% of those in the two older generations.

Boy oh boy the real estate market is back with a vengeance. All of my Architect and Engineering friends are busier than right before the 2007 meltdown. Building additions, knockdowns, and the like are flooding in. It seems that everyone just woke up this year and got busy. Flippers are back And the Flippers are back… My real estate investing friends (aka Flippers) are snapping up house at County Court Houses for pennies on the dollar, cleaning and fixing them, then flipping back onto the market.

ICYMI the Startup markets are getting hotter in the Data Science space. Every time I turn around, some small company got millions of dollars in startup funding. It used to be a company with an algorithm or data science library but now it’s Data Science platforms. These platforms are suddenly all the rage and many new entrants are racing to gain market and mind share. The above image from FundersandFounders.com really captures a successful startup from inception to IPO.

I’ve been following Howard and Fred on and off over the years. They’re old Web 2.0 veterans like me and have kept a blog going for over 10 years. It’s always nice to see continuity and recently I found a great interview of Fred at MIT on Howard’s blog. It’s just under an hour and gives advice to students interested in the Venture Capitalist (VC) field. CheerleadersWhat caught my ear (and Howard’s too) was how his wife (Gotham Girl) is his biggest cheerleader.

Let’s talk Process Mining and Engineering. Why? Because it’s the silver bullet that many Engineering firms are looking for but have never found. Let me explain. I’ve spent years working at small and large Engineering firms and they hardly made any money. Engineering firms are notorious for making 1 to 3% net margin at the end of the day. The joke was that the only reason these firms exist is to keep people employed!

Despite all the bruhaha that’s going on in Washington, entrepreneurs are reinventing how children are educated. Teachers and EdTech companies need to work together to create the products that will create permanent change in classrooms across the globe. Teachers need EdTech companies to build great products to serve their students more effectively. EdTech companies need teachers to buy into their creations so that they can find a successful home for their products.

I have a daily downtime routine. Every evening I set aside about a hour and think. I sit or walk around the house and ruminate about all sorts of random things. Sometimes it’s with a glass of wine and more often it’s with a cup of black tea and milk. Sometimes my mind wanders to what I did that day or what I didn’t finish. Other times I get inspired to write a new blog post or create a new tutorial.

It looks like Google is catching up to the idea of machine learning on a Raspberry Pi! Someone put RapidMiner on a Pi back in 2013 but it was slow because the Pi was underpowered. The Pi has been a great thin client and a small, but capable server. I’ve used it for my Personal Weather Station project and as an FTP server. Based on the news, things are about to get interesting for both Google and Raspberry Pi.

Bless me Father for I have sinned. Please forgive me for my evergreen content creation and management sins. Yes, I admit I have mismanaged good content for the sake of expediency. The takeaway from this long post is this, always think about your reader first. Often I have ignored how my readers consume my evergreen content. For that, I beg for your absolution. I promise, on my CMS’s grave, not to stray from the path of good content creation and management again.

I recently read a great article on the Freemium model that resonated with me. It kept me thinking for several days afterwards about how some startups with freemium models “made it” and how others failed. The difference between success and failure has become a very fine line indeed. I completely get it, it’s all about how many users your product or service has. The rationale has always been that more users == more revenue and many startups created wonderful free products (i.

I was in France last week for my neice’s wedding. We had a great time and really enjoyed the French countryside. We got sample some delicious wine and food, danced, and met lots of great people. We talked and laughed but eventually all our casual conversations with the French turned toward our Presidential Election and Donald Trump. Needless to say, many French that I talked to are appalled by Donald Trump but some like his authoritative style and that bothers me.

Recently I imported some custom reports in Google Analytics that I found online. They have been eye opening indeed! My most favorite ones are the Profit Index and Time of Day custom reports. Google Analytics assigns a page value to each and every page you have, provided you use Goals. Without using Goals, this won’t work! In my previous post, I wrote about how I started using Goals to see how readers interacted with my site.

One of my Asian friends recently posted a link to a terrifying use of Machine Learning. This is what I call the “dark side” of this field, the use of machine learning by a government to make you behave a certain way. 1984’s Big Brother China is building its own version of 1984’s Big Brother, a massive scoring system that’s probably a large scale classification algorithm most likely sitting on top of a Big Data structure like Hadoop.

Last night the kids and I were across the street at another family’s house for dinner. Their kids are the same age as my daughter and son and often stay for dinner at our house. Last night after dinner we got to talking about the current state of education and how we can better educate our kids. Both the husband and wife have careers in the creative fields and are big supporters of STEM.

October 2016 Just a quick list of the content I’ve created some place other than this blog. This current list is 100% RapidMiner related but I’d like to branch out into guest posting. If any of my readers would like a guest post on their blog or site from me, then contact me. Tips and Tricks: How to use Python and R with Rapidminer Tips and Tricks: Different Ways to Join Data How to Use Data Science to Predict Qualifed Leads December 2018 I’m happy to announce my very first article went live on the H2O.

For the last two years I’ve been working with the Twython package to build my (R2D2) Twitter Bot. It’s been successful and I’ve learned how to hack Python better than I ever did before. Now I’m setting my sites on building a Twitter Bot using Groovy Script. Why Groovy Script? Groovy is a lot like Python in the sense that it’s a dynamic programming language. It can be used everywhere, easily, because of the JVM.

This is my first stab at trying to figure out how to optimize the SEO here. A doodle/sketch just seems the fastest in this case. Update I have since given a lot of thought to SEO on this blog as I migrated it from one CMS to another. Each CMS handles SEO in a completely different manner and over time the migrations have had, in some way, a damaging effect here.

First off this is not a political post but I will come out and say it. Make America Great Again is a stupid slogan. I admit there are problems with the middle class but America is and will continue to be great. Why? Because of what I wrote two years ago. It’s as relevant today as it was back then. Startup Land Two years ago I wrote a LinkedIn article on a train ride home titled “I believe in America.

Below is an integrated post of my Blot Tutorials. It’s a small list but appears to be useful to some Blot users. Blot.Im is a neat Dropbox/Github to blog static generator which I fancied for a while. I still like it but it’s not as mature as Hugo but it has promise. It definately is easy to drop images into a folder and it creates a blog post from it, so if you like super easy of use, then try out Blot.

I’ve been going through a massive blog post purge and deciding which posts to keep or trash. Why? I have so many posts that were like Tweets, short and meaningless. They just bogged down my performance and really provided my readers with zero information. This blog started dying at the beginning of 2020, Google made some Search Engine Results Page (SERP) changes and my blog started dropping like a rock. There were 100’s of similar blogs that were ranking better because they knew how to play the SEO game and I didn’t.

I have news. I’ve been mulling around the idea for this post for the last two years, ever since I joined RapidMiner. The journey at RapidMiner has been and continues to be fantastic. In those short two years I’ve worn many hats there, I started as a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant, then moved to a Sales Engineer role, and now I’m Marketing Data Scientist. I’ve made the move from Sales to Marketing and my chips remain all in.

Long time readers know that I’ve struggled with blogging platforms for a long time. I finally opted for a static post approach because it’s safer than the PHP code injections that Wordpress suffers (suffered?) from. The bonus side of platforms like Wordpress is that they have 1000’s of great plugins to download and turbo charge your blog. I really liked this but I got tired of having my PHP templates “code injected” with spam attacks.

I think it was back in 2010 when I met up with an old high school classmate. Let’s call her “T,” and she was in between marketing jobs. I reached out to her because we had an opening for a CMO at my old engineering firm and thought she would be great for it. She had recently worked on some really cool NGO campaigns and I liked her forward thinking. I eventually convinced her to throw her hat in the ring for the CMO gig but that’s not the most important thing I learned from our get together.

Trends come and go in the blink of an eye these days. Usually some market disrupter comes along and changes the game with a shiny new thing. Sometimes it’s a service or product that gets shutdown. That’s exactly what happened here. This is the story of Google Reader and the rise of Social Sharing. Before Social Sharing was the “thing”, RSS was the life blood of blogging. Many bloggers (myself included) reached thousands of RSS feed readers daily.

Brian tweeted an interesting link the other day about a new trend that HBR picked up on. It was about newly minted MBA graduates buying existing businesses instead of going into right into the consulting world. At the Harvard Business School, for example, the number of MBAs who decide to look for a business to acquire right after graduation has gone from less than a handful a decade ago to more than a dozen, and in an occasional year, twice that amount.

I’m completely boggled by the vast amounts of money that’s looking to be invested. It’s been finding homes in Startups from AirBnB to [Domo][3] and Uber. The money raised by these Startups is so insane that Fortune dubs them unicorns. The king of the Unicorns is Uber. Uber is ranked #1 on the list with a valuation of $62 Billion dollars. Yes you read that right. 62 freaking billion dollars! How is that even possible for a taxi service?

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. Somewhere between 2010 and and 2011 I stopped Forex Trading and stopped stock picking. It was just too much stress and felt very futile.

Long time readers know that I’ve wrestled with different CMS engines on this site. I started with Wordpress, then switched to Expression Engine, and then back to Wordpress. Along the way I tried Text Pattern and even Posterous. Expression Engine and Text Pattern are just plain terrible and I wouldn’t recommend them. Wordpress is a great entry level CMS and it’s great for non-technical people. In minutes you can have yourdomain.

Last week I shared a few thoughts around what it takes to be a Sales Engineer in a high tech startup. My last thought, around understanding value, begs for a full post on that subject. I hear the word “value” thrown around so often that I wonder if it has a real meaning anymore. Everyone says their new product or service provides value, but what does that mean? When I think about what true value means, I approach it from two distinct angles: time and money.

If you asked me 2 years ago if I’d be working in Sales at a high tech startup, I’d say you were nuts! Fast forward to today and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Today I’m a Sales Engineer at an advanced analytic startup. What exactly is a Sales Engineer? Wikipedia defines it as a hybrid between Sales and Engineering, an interesting combination indeed. I live in a Goldilocks world of solving problems and selling the solution.

The one thing that is as important as your product is your messaging about it. In some ways, messaging is more powerful because if no one knows how great your product is, you’re toast. To illustrate my point, let’s investigate the phrase “the medium is the message.” Originally coined by Marshall McLuhan, Marshall tells us the the medium (product) and message are one of the same. Your message becomes your product and your product becomes your message.

Back in middle school we learned about log tables. We learned how to look them up in a table, interpolate them, and then use the result in our equations. Later on they allowed us to use calculators, which made our lives easier and faster. Fast forward many years to a Sunday morning this October. I was at my dining table with my laptop open, fooling with Pandas and iPython Notebooks (aka Juypter).

In today’s Advanced Analytic landscape we often hear about the mythical Data Scientist that can cure all our problems and unearth value hidden deep in our data. He/she needs to know Math and Statistics, be able to Hack, and have deep Domain knowledge about a given problem. Drew Conway famously put together a Venn Diagram to show you what I mean. Yet, I always found this Venn Diagram a bit lacking for the softer skills.

The world right now is awash in Predictive Analytics, the mystery of Big Data, and the rise of the glorious and magical Data Scientist. Most of the time we hear these buzz words in relation to some marketing campaign, election, or credit score application process, but what about applying these tools and people to a project that can benefit the welfare of humanity? Well, one group of data scientists and a healthcare provider in Washington State are doing just that.

Do you know what you’re doing with your Big Data? Based on my experience, only a small group of companies really do. There’s just one little problem, as Intel cloud platforms group vice president and general manager Jason Waxman, told investors in a webcast last week. “This is the dirty little secret about big data: No one actually knows what to do with it,” said Waxman, as ComputerWorld reported. Link (emphasis mine)

I first started out with the #RaPi project, installing and configuring RapidAnalytics on a 2 Pi cluster successfully. The experiment came to a grinding halt after I tried to initialize RapidAnalytics. The 2 Pi cluster was ridiculously underpowered and I couldn’t get it to run successfully. I theorize that that problem could be solved by adding a 3rd or even 4th Pi to the cluster and trying again. Today, I have two Pi’s in production running my media center (Raspbmc) and another uploading my weather station (WeWxx) data to the Internet.

Churn models are not new in the analytics world, they’re heavily used by mobile telcos and other corporations that want to keep their loyal customers happy, and bring back customers from the brink of “about to churn.” In some cases, these models will help classify a group of customers that are such a pain in the butt to keep, it’s better to let them go. Makes business sense, right? Keep the best customers happy, group the customers that are about to leave into the ones you can save or not.

I’ve been meaning to give you an update on what’s been happening at my local coin show (Feb 2014). The short of it is that general attendance is down, the regulars Numismatics are back, and the majority of dealers are buying silver and gold back. This is an interesting change of sentiment because the last time I was there (about a year ago), gold and silver were at higher levels and lots of noobs were there buying coins.

This past Friday I resigned from my position as a Civil Engineering Manager at SYSTRA, my employer of the last 6+ years. I did this because an opportunity of a lifetime knocked on my door, an opportunity that will give me a chance to pursue my passion in an exciting and growing field. In short, an opportunity to follow my dreams. I've accepted a position as a senior consultant at Rapidminer, in their Boston headquarters, and I couldn't be more excited about this.

I finally got my Personal Weather Station (PWS) to upload current weather data to Wunderground1 last night. You have no idea how happy this made me, considering I started this project over a year ago but then got interrupted with “life.” I dedicated my first Raspberry Pi to Bitcoin mining, so I needed a second one (Pi’s are addicting, and cheap) to finally get my PWS up and running on the Internet.

Below you’ll find a merged set of posts on my Raspberry Pi Tutorials and fun links I found. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap credit card sized computer that helps kid ‘hack’ and learn computing. It’s a great way to build lots of fun projects too. I hope to add to this list as time goes on but I thought my readers would like to see an updated list from my archives.

The image below is my first Raspberry Pi computer.  It's an amazing little thing and I decided to purchase one ($35 USD) so I can connect it to my weather station and upload its data, in 15 minute intervals, to the Internet and my FTP site.  Why?  Well I love data if you haven't figured that out by now, and I want to give back to the community. So far I've installed the Raspbian Linux kernel on a 4GB SD card and got it to recognize and connect an Edimax Wifi dongle(sp).

I’ve been traveling a lot lately and managed to catch up on a bit of reading when I’m crusing at 30,000 feet. On my nook right now is a fascinating book that all text miners should at least browse in a book store. It’s called “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” by James Pennebaker. The premise of the book is that your social status, sex, personality, and secret intentions can be determined by analyzing pronouns (I, you, they), artciles (a, an, the), and few other functional words.

It’s probably no surprise to my readers that in addition to trading and building neural net models, I like to collect coins and paper money, especially paper money that’s worthless. As a Numismatic, my approach to coin collecting is simple; collect items I like and add in a few items for their metal value (gold and silver). I probably do more collecting nowadays than trading because the markets have become one highly frequent casino.

Today’s guest post about an awesome new plugin for Rapidminer, is from Milan Vukicevic. Although I walked in at the very end of his presentation at RCOMM 2010, I sat down with Milan on my last day and he gave me a personal demo of WhiBo. The applications I see from this plugin, as it relates to the financial world, is its ability to build algorithms on new data, find patterns, and tweak parameters that were never possible before.

Wow, I’m happy to announce that today is the first of a two part guest post series. Today’s guest post is by Marin Matijas, who gave a presentation at RCOMM 2010 about Short Term Load Forecasting using Support Vector Machines (SVM). I asked Marin to elaborate a little about his use of the Radial Bias Function (RBF) in Rapidminer’s SVM operator and here’s what he had to say! I did edit the post a bit for readability.

I got my ass spanked in the markets over the last year.  My 401k portfolios are surviving after some severe drawdowns (25%) between 2008 and 2009 and my trading capital in my Forex and Stock accounts got destroyed.  Luckily it was only risk capital, money I could afford to lose, but it still hurts anway.  So what did I learn from this hell of a market?  I learned that I’m not as smart as the market and that I tried to second guess it too much.

I think I’m going to start a new weekly data visualization feature on Neural Market Trends, starting with the OECD. I love web sites that take complex, and sometimes boring data, and displays them in a visually pleasing way. This week’s data visualization feature is the OECD Factbook eXplorer which is maintained by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD is an organization that compiles all kinds of data for many countries and then allows you to display that onto a flash based map.

After I read this WSJ article I realized that we are in the buying opportunity of a lifetime. That is if you are a contrarian, emphasis mine. =) The ups and downs of the market are prompting more retail investors to abandon buy-and-hold strategies in favor of opportunistic trading. Some want more control over their money, so they are fleeing funds and advisers — not to mention the feelings of helplessness raised by recent months’ losses.

Since my time away from blogging, I’ve found a new distraction addiction to keep my overactive mind busy. It’s called Go, an ancient strategy game that’s really big in the Asian world but catching on here. Its a fun game and I routinely get beat online by 6 year old children from all over the world. So, what does Go have in common with neural nets and AI? Quite a lot actually because programmers are working frantically to build a Go program that can beat humans.

Say what you want about Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but he’s a smart man. I could help but laugh when I read this line from an interview with The Street.com. “I haven’t been this bullish in years,” says Kiyosaki. “What a buying opportunity. … The stock market goes on sale, and everybody runs away.” But, he’s excited probably only for a short time. “When the market comes back, I go back to sleep,” he says.

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. I finished reading Gene Callahan’s, Economics for Real People, a while ago but never had the chance to write a blog post about it.

I roamed around a lot when I lived in New Mexico and I came across several ghost towns. I loved finding them out in the middle of nowhere and poking around in them. If I had more time I would probably researched the reason why they were abandoned but we didn’t stay too long at them. Usually they were on private property and had big “KEEP OUT” signs and we had to always watched out for a Rancher with a big rifle.

Ugly posted this interesting LA Times article his Del.icio.us link role a few days ago. It seems that people with upside down mortgages (where your mortgage is greater than the value of your house) are voluntarily letting their properties be foreclosed on. A homeowner who can’t sell his house tells the L.A.Times, “Foreclose me. … I’ll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I’ll save my money and I’ll move on.

I’m going to spend some time updating this old post from 2007 where I had a banner year trading Forex. Granted, this was for a tiny account but I wanted to see if I could really make the returns that everyone was shouting about. The short answer is “YES! but…” There’s always a ‘but’ in when investing, trading, or speculating in any traded market. As promised, see the PDF link below for my entire 2007 Forex trading log.

I stopped taking Resveratrol per my Doctor’s orders. About a two weeks ago I noticed my ankles were starting to swell slightly and they went crazy over the Christmas holiday. I finally had to go to the ER this past Wednesday (12/26) because my ankles looked like Grapefruits. I couldn’t walk and it hurt to stand for more than a few seconds. The initial blood test results show that my kidneys are spilling proteins into my urine and my Doctor is referring me to a kidney specialist.

Babak posted about a possible double top forming in Gold (and Oil) in his blog a few days ago. While I agree with his technical analysis on the daily charts, I disagree with his conclusion that Gold has topped out. In my mind, Gold is driven 80% by fundamental reasons instead of technical analysis. If you look at the weekly chart, Gold looks poised to possibly make a run higher after this consolidation.

I live in a semi-rural area of NJ with lots of trees, open space, and great neighbors. My wife has gotten into gardening over the past few years and learned that you can “trade” plants instead of buying them at Lowes and Home Depot. She met this old German couple on the other side of town who transformed their 1 acre property into a virtual Garden of Eden and did so by trading plants with neighbors and friends.

I’ve been laying low for a while now with respect to buying and flipping foreclosure properties. You might think that I’m nuts because everywhere you turn now you see and hear about the parabolic rise of foreclosures in this country and the end of the RE world. Although foreclosure activity has picked up and more houses are now being repossessed by banks, I still haven’t smelled enough blood and desperation out there yet.

Every Forex Trader I know trades differently. Some are mechanical traders while others are purely discretionary in a nature. Some even use “bots” to trade automatically with little or no intervention from them. No matter what kind of Forex Trader you are, the one thing I learned in trading these insane markets is that when you find something that works, stick with it! If you’ve been following my $100 Forex Experiment, you’d know that my Forex education has had its ups and downs.

I promised my readers that I would post about YALE/RapidMiner’s LibSVM operator over a month ago. Unfortunately life had gotten in the way and I’m resorting to a multiple part series to just get the information out to you, so bear with me over the course of the next few days (or weeks) as I write about this exciting, powerful, and complicated learner. First off, I use the LibSVM operator in YALE 3.

Ugly’s been on the path of discovering Ayn Rand and he posted this article from the NY Times this weekend. I’ve been a fan of Ayn Rand for many years after receiving a copy of Atlas Shrugged from my old boss Bob. He was the owner of the local 7-11 where I worked the Saturday overnight shift and soon discovered that he was quite the entrepreneur. He knew that I was working two jobs and going to school full-time to help my family make ends meet.

Since this blog is about using neural nets and AI, its only appropriate that I post about an awesome audio book I’m currently listening too. I like supplement my voracious appetite for books with audio books on occasion and have more space devoted to audio books on my 4 gig nano than I do with music. The current book I’m listening too, “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain” by Sharon Begely is utterly fascinating.

Sherry posted an excerpt from an article she read in my “Real Estate Will Get Worse” post. The author of the article, Jackie Corr, points out an interesting leveraged strategy that is very plausible why hedge funds have been posting out of control losses recently. If you buy a stock for $36 and sell it for $72 four months later, you’ve made 100% on your money. If you add $30 of borrowed money to $6 of your own to buy the stock at $36 and sell the shares at $72, your profit is $36, but you’ve made 600% on your $6 of which the hedge fund takes a percentage, roughly 2 percent or 72 cents, so your profit is now $35.

I used to flip foreclosure properties leading up to the height of the RE bubble. It was tough work finding these properties, marketing to them, and then screening the potential sellers. Since I didn’t have the capital to buy the properties myself, for cash, I had to get an investor involved and made a few bucks at it. I learned a lot but realized that it was too time consuming so I stopped.

The last time I was in Macau, I stayed at my brother in-law’s place. Outside his balcony I watched the construction of what was to become billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian casino. It looked really cool and was massive in size compared to its neighbor, Sands. The Venetian boasts what it claims to be the world’s largest gaming space of 550,000 square feet (50,000 square meters), housing 3,400 slot machines – with room to expand to 6,000 – and more than 800 gambling tables.

On a random aside, one of my favorite authors from years gone by is Ralph Waldo Emerson. I know that Ugly is exploring Ayn Rand’s Objective philosophies and I suggest he read Emerson’s Essay on Self Reliance as part of his “spiritual” growth. If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life.

My wife owns Dodge & Cox’s Stock Fund (DODGX) and its been a great performer for her account. I just wish they offered it in my 401K! Despite the nice trending chart below, DODGX is not without its risks. I ran a quick Monte Carlo simulation and discovered quite a few nasty negative return outcomes for DODGX. In fact there’s 0.04% chance for a nasty -51% rate of return over the past 10 years.

I’m in the process of merging and updating old posts with fresh insights and content. I dropped the AI part because what it really means is automation in this sense. Building blog traffic is always about writing great content and observing what Google’s AI does to get you to the top of the search results AI is just an algorithm that’s built on top of the existing data you have. In a sense you fit an algorithm, to the data instead of fitting the data to the algorithm.

I stumbled across a +45 minute podcast from the Royal Society of Arts yesterday which is highly entertaining, in a quantitative sort of way. The speaker that night was none other than Nassim Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. It’s a fantastic listen to, especially when he talks about something called “Black Swan positive.” Black Swan Events (BSE) are outlier events, events that you never dreamed of occurring but they do.

I went long $XLV in mid January 2007 for one of my personal IRA accounts. Its had its share of ups and downs but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist, or a fancy neural net, to figure out that health care is a long term bet. If you don’t believe me, look around for all the graying baby-boomers who want to desperately hold onto their youth. This time I’m holding XLV for a very long time and won’t be shaken out of it.

The inspiration for my S&P500 Volatility Timing model came from rereading portions of Mandelbrot’s book, The (Mis)Behavior of Markets, and trolling around the Internet for Nassim Taleb’s research work on risk. I think both guys push the envelope on truly understanding unseen risk and those pesky financial asteroids. Since my model is currently being developed, I thought it would be worth my while to truly learn and understand how historical volatility (HV) is calculated.

CMG is hitting an all-time high these days and after eating their tasty food, I can understand why. Good food at high prices is always a surefire way to make your stock a winner, until your fickle customers become cost conscience. My favorite dish is the chicken burrito bowl w/ sour cream and the red hot sauce. :) Update I posted about this stock back in May 2007 when it was trading at $82 or so and now, in 2019, it’s way higher.

Thirteen years ago I made a simple post about building neural net models. Since then, the field of applied machine learning and data science has changed a great deal. Over a single decade new tools and the open source movement have altered how companies do ‘AI.’ They moved from data mining data in databases to building data lakes and clusters. Now, small to large companies are seeking ways to harness these tools under the umbrella of ‘AI.

I’ve posted this article before on my old site and thought it was fitting to re-post it here. It’s a story about a company called Tradebot Systems, Inc. CEO David Cummings, a former commodity pit trader and programmer, built an Automated Trading System, or Tradebot, which trades between 50 and 100 million shares a day! Wow! Tradebot trades 50 million to 100 million shares a day. Anywhere from 1 billion to 2 billion shares trade daily on Nasdaq.

Howard wants to buy put options on SMH. Me? I will wait and see which way she breaks from this narrow range, which started in mid 2005, before I do anything. Has it been trading in range for that long? My guess is that semiconductors aren’t the technology darlings they once were, maybe its because chips are more of a commodity now. Disclosure: Long INTC from years back. Update Here’s a perfect case for long term passive investing in an ETF.

I worked in my vegetable garden for most of the weekend and with every weed I plucked, the words “Ethanol” and “bio-fuel” kept popping in my head. I know that everywhere I turn, I see and hear about how Ethanol is going to save us from oil dependence and global warming. Despite my skepticism about Ethanol, I am curious to know what set of this new trend in the Agriculture index?

I’ve been following the China iShares, FXI, for a long time now and I noticed that Maoxian posted about it nearing its all time high. This reminded me of the time when the talk was that FXI might be overextended or possibly reaching a top. At the time, it sure looked that way. I even posted on my old site saying that the trend might be over but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my initial call was wrong.

Several years ago, when I was living in New Mexico, I had a girlfriend who used read very esoteric books about cutting edge theories on biology, evolution, and astronomy. We were talking about “what-if” scenarios one day and the conversation drifted to some called “punctuated equilibrium.” It was explained to me, at the time, that species evolve slowly in an environment that’s in equilibrium. A sudden leap in a species evolutionary development happens when a catastrophic internal or external event occurs.

In my old blog, Digital Breakfast, I posted a few times about my desire to build an Automated Trading System (ATS) using Excel. I figured I’d build it in Excel since I know that software the best and conveniently enough, Interactive Brokers offers an API for Excel. Today, I located my old real time ETF Trend Signal system, which is based on statistical performance measures to generate trend signals, and decided to begin additional back end development on it.

There’s something to be said about buying winners. Winners continue to win, and in the case of stocks, they keep making new highs. I know that AAPL is a favorite holding of Howard and his hedge fund’s strategy of finding and investing select stocks making new 52 week all time highs is a smart. The trick is to buy the right company making the high. It’s safe to say that Apple is the right company, its emerged as an innovative powerhouse once again.

I heard this first on Bloomberg Radio and then found the article. It’s about the ever increasing use of data mining and AI in the financial markets. In his cubicle overlooking the trading floor, Kearns, 44, consults with Lehman Brothers traders as Ph.D.s tap away at secret software. The programs they’re writing are designed to sift through billions of trades and spot subtle patterns in world markets. Kearns, a computer scientist who has a doctorate from Harvard University, says the code is part of a dream he’s been chasing for more than two decades: to imbue computers with artificial intelligence, or AI.

Sometimes trends have intra-trend reversals (which are great selling or buying opportunities) and then quickly resume their trends. Motorola tried to break free from their down trend, and almost succeeded with the introduction of their wildly popular Razr phone (I have one). With no new innovative product followup, MOT resumed its downward trend. Update Just over 12 years ago I posted about how [Motorola (MOT) was in a downtrend because it couldn’t come up with a new breakthrough product.

Could the trend party in IYR be over? Maybe. A lot of information can be gleaned from observing a price chart, mostly technical information. A lot of traders/investors forget that fundamental and sentiment information also drives prices up or down. Learn Stock Trading, Investing, and Risk Management There are a handful of financial and trading books that have made a HUGE impact on my investments. If you want to trade and learn about money and risk management that I suggest you get the Tharp book.

Good Morning. Yesterday’s currency sell-off triggered several of my buy orders as the EURUSD and GBPUSD pairs dropped through support after support. The end result was that I started to pyramid losses. However, I stuck to my trading plan and planned for a long wild ride. In case any new readers are wondering, I will (re)post my trading plan on this blog later today. Finally, overnight the pairs started to firm up and now my GBPUSD pair is showing a nice profit as it heads back to the magic $2.

EWM was good to me in the past, too bad I sold it! Update EWM. What a great ETF for investing into the Asia area. This is one of those emerging market ETF’s that I should’ve held onto for the past 13 years. Once again I’m going to repeat what I wrote about passive investing: diversify, buy low cost mutual funds/ETFs, and dollar cost average. Look at EWM now, trading around $27.

My FXI neural net model continues to show an UP trend. Nice to know! :) Update I realize that after 13 some odd years, this one sentence blog post with a FXI chart is very much out of context. This post was a simple confirmation of a model I built for trading/investing in this particular ETF. This was the early days of my learning Data Science and boy was my model wrong from the start.

Welcome to Neural Market Trends, an award-winning data science and machine learning blog created by Thomas Ott in 2007. In the past my blog focused on RapidMiner Tutorials and their application to the Financial Markets. As sidebars I wrote commentary on Trading, Forex the Markets, Investing, and the market implosion in 2007 / 2008. My blog has undergone many changes over the years and it continues to do so. I wrote a lot of RapidMiner and other Data Science and Machine Learning tutorials, I made videos, and then started focusing on SEO and Startup life.