May 2012 Archives

These are my links for May 22nd through May 25th:

• Facebook's stock debut shows not all investors are equal - latimes.com - "Market theory is very simple," Spitzer said. "You can't give false and misleading material information to people, where you know it's false and you correct it only to some but not to others."
• Ambient Weather WS-1090-WHUB3-KIT Wifi Wireless Weather Station - For Father's Day - mine and my Dad's
• Information Extraction Rapidminer Plugin -
• Sales of U.S. Existing Homes Increase as Market Stabilizes - Bloomberg - Gains in employment, depressed prices and record-low mortgage rates may bring more properties within reach of buyers, eliminating a source weakness for the world’s largest economy just as risks from Europe’s debt crisis climb. At the same time, efforts to reduce foreclosures and free up financing are just beginning to take root, signaling a sustained housing recovery will take time to develop.- AT LEAST TWO MORE YEARS OF TEPID REAL ESTATE ACTIVITY IF YOU ASK ME.
• Americans Worried About Retirement Savings, But Saving More | AAII: The American Association of Individual Investors - The survey found an increase in the percentage of respondents who are worried about not having enough money to meet living expenses in retirement and outliving their retirement savings. - KEEP BUYING THOSE LATTES AT STARBUCKS.
• Kakha Bendukidze Holds Fate of Gene-Engineered Salmon - NYTimes.com - The animal biotechnology industry is anemic to begin with. AquaBounty is the only American company seriously trying to win approval for a transgenic animal for the food supply. - THIS SHIT BOTHERS ME.
• My Paper Trades: Volume by Price Charts using R - More interesting R code
• Volume by Price charts with R – first attempt | DataPunks.com - Ah, the original price/volume R code and author. Finally.
• Analyze Words - What does AnalyzeWords do? AnalyzeWords helps reveal your personality by looking at how you use words. It is based on good scientific research connecting word use to who people are. So go to town - enter your Twitter name or the handles of friends, lovers, or Hollywood celebrities to learn about their emotions, social styles, and the ways they think. - IT CRASHES FOR @NEURALMARKET. HMMMM.
• Twitter / Discover - Kinda of digging this new Twitter #Discover thing.

This chart shows you that there is some truth to the "Sell in May" and the "Santa Claus" rally. Plus it's the main reason why I rebalance my 401k on April 30th and October 31st. I know I posted this before, sometime ago when I was having CMS issues, but I can't remember when.  Anyway, thanks to Eric for this fantastic script!  

These are my links for March 22nd through May 17th:

• R: Quantitative Financial Modelling Framework - All you need to know about the quantmod package
• Housing crash is getting worse Brett Arends' ROI - MarketWatch - Zillow now predicts prices will fall about 8% this year and says it no longer expects the market to bottom before 2012. NO "S" SHERLOCK
• The Aleph Blog » Blog Archive » Why Amateurs Should Invest in Common Stocks - Now, some of the successes came with failures.  For a while, I told my kids never to mention the name “Caldor” to me.  Yeh, Michael Price may have lost a billion on that one, but I more than took my licks.  Until you lose a decent amount, you don’t really understand how the market works.  You can call it market tuition, but like tuition at college, you don’t know how much value you will get out of what you have paid.
• Student discovers new virus in ancient cave mud | MNN - Mother Nature Network - Further analysis proved to be even more remarkable. Lurking in the dank sample of cave mud she collected was a virus previously unknown to science — a bacteriophage that attacks bacteria from the same family as those that cause tuberculosis.
• Smart money left silver to tarnish retail buyers - MarketWatch - The trend suggests the so-called ’smart money,’ the large managed funds that report to the CFTC, had started to back away from silver and “retail investors picked up the slack,” said Tom Pawlicki, a precious metals analyst with MF Global in Chicago. - HOW TRUE BASED ON MY EXPERIENCE AT THE COIN SHOW.
• Judge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books - NYTimes.com - The deal would have allowed Google to make millions of out-of-print books broadly available online and to sell access to them, while giving authors and publishers new ways to earn money from digital copies of their works. Yet the deal faced a tidal wave of opposition from Google rivals like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as some academics, authors, legal scholars, states and foreign governments. The Justice Department also opposed the deal, fearing that it would give Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan works, books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.
• First North Pole Ozone Hole Forming? - The cold snap is no coincidence, research leader Rex added."This is the continuation of a long-term tendency that the cold Arctic winters have become colder," Rex said.And global warming may drive this trend, he added. As greenhouse gases trap heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere, the higher levels tend to cool, he said.Of course, the "process is more complicated than this simple explanation"—there may be many ways in which greenhouse gases influence high-altitude temperatures, he added. - WE BETTER MAKE CHANGES FAST!
• S.D. Requires Visit to Pregnancy Center Before Abortion - NYTimes.com - “South Dakota women should not need to submit to an in-person lecture from an unqualified, noncertified, faith-based counselor or volunteer at an antichoice crisis pregnancy center,,” Ms. Gibson said. - DA LOCAL GUBIMENT MESSING WIT MY WOMAN.
• Detroit suffers 25% loss, population lowest in 100 years - USATODAY.com -
• RClimate_GISS_temp_anom_map.png (1200×1000) - IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE

This is what happens when Jamie Dimon from $JPM goes against the Volcker Rule. Here's the R Code (JPM) to generate this chart. You must have the quantmod package installed.

Looks like lots of volume activity around the 1300 level for the S&P500.  That's the line in the sand, for now. Now, if only I could figure out how to make the dates appear correctly in the x-axis... Update: To give credit where credit is due, the original author of the code is Eric Nguyen from Datapunks.com. Go check him out.

It's been a while since I fired up R and charted out the rolling performance of SPY, GLD, and SLV.  Here it is. You'll note that the SPY has outperformed relatively to the metal ETFs, probably because everyone is taking profits to cover their positions.

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. In the beginning of his research, James used the Liguisitic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program but appears to have modified it with proprietary word dictionaries. From the surface, LIWC looks similar to the word frequency routine that Rapidminer does in the Process Documents operator, but they went further and added a bit more "intelligence" to the analysis. What they did was roll out a fun servce called Analyze Words. You just enter your Twitter handle, click the button, and it gives you a snapshot into your tweet sentiment. So how does this work?  I suspect that James and team use their dictionaries to categorize incoming text documents and test against them and for the author's sex, social status, personality, and sentiment. I'm sure that a lot of "up front" and hard work was done to build these dictionaries.  A lot of "up front" work is the norm with text mining and if you try using short cuts, you'll likely get crappy models. I think a model like his can be done quite easily in Rapidminer, especially if you build a good crawling and sentiment system to test against. All that it requires is a bit of thought and the will to do it.  Isn't the data driven world we live in, cool?

I think I finally got all the hacker code cleared from this site. What a terrible, time consuming mess! The next steps is to get Google to check if I'm still hosting any malware. Thanks for your patience.