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.