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.