Neural Market Trends

List of Free Statistical Software

2013-02-23T14:16:05Z

Analyticbridge forum poster Richard has compiled a nice list of free statistical software. It's a great resource and I was able to find some great packages that I didn't know existed. Of course Rapidminer and R was on the list, it wouldn't be complete without them!

Archive Post Status

2013-02-18T11:57:56Z

It's come to my attention that several of my popular archived posts didn't make it in the transfer from Wordpress to Moveabletype. I apologize for the inconvenience that's causing, and its most likely the culprit behind my precipitous drop in the Google ranks.

My goal is to work out all the kinks in the coming weeks, please be patient.

Happy Year of the Snake

2013-02-17T22:33:23Z

Happy New Year of the Snake my Asian readers! I'm so glad that 2012 is over because it was a terrible year for me. I've been stuck on a soul crushing project, which continues to make me miserable and absolutely demoralized.

I haven't done ANY data or text mining in several months and feel like I'm a bit out of touch, but I hope to change that.

I have several goals for 2013, one of them is trying my hand at entrepreneurship in the data analytic field, and continue developing my Python and Rapidminer skills.

Python's NLTK Module

2012-12-06T13:48:32Z

Whenever I have a few minutes I've been fooling around with Python's Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) and have found it to be incredibly fascinating, powerful, and easy to use. Mostly I've been following the examples from the NLTK Book as I learn to navigate around. There is a section in the book about classifying text data, which I still need to dig through, but I found the section on "tagging" word data fascinating.

The goal for me is to use Python to scrape the data together and then let Rapidminer mine the data. For ease of use of powerful operators, Rapidminer wins hands down. If only they can extend Rapidminer with Python, like what the did for R, then I'll be happy as a nerd in new data!

Looking for my Rapidminer Videos

2012-11-21T12:50:00Z

Ever since I switched my CMS from Wordpress to Moveabletype, my Rapidminer video tutorial links have been broken. I haven't had time to clean them up, much less create any new ones.

Fear not! They videos exist on Youtube and you can access them at my Neuralmarkettrends1 channel.

Hello Python

2012-11-12T17:58:37Z

I finally managed to get Python up and running on my server, and managed to run the Hello World test script. I know its lame, but its a big deal for me.

Sentiment Mining in Rapidminer

2012-06-07T10:18:19Z

I came across a great slideshare presentation from RCOMM 2011 about how to use Rapidminer for sentiment mining. While I wasn't there for this presentation, you can get a good idea how Bruno Ohana and Brendan Tierney applied the various operators to the IMBD movie database.

Transfer to Moveable Type complete

2012-06-06T23:45:41Z

I've transferred the blog to moveable type, hopefully minimizing the hacker exploits. Wordpress, while an easy to use blogging platform, is riddled with security holes. Likewise, the same can be said with all of them (Expression Engine, Text Pattern), but I hope this nuttiness is behind me now.

What's left to do now is to clean out old useless posts, fix the links on the Rapidminer Tutorials, and take the blog into a new direction.

Thanks for your patience, things will hopefully get active again here.

Links for June 6th

2012-06-06T17:00:00Z

These are my links for June 6th:

You Are Not a Curator, You Are Actually Just a Filthy Blogger | The Awl - As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I'm fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it's not actually curation, or anything like it. - VIA MAOXIAN. TRUE, YOU MUST CREATE TO CURATE - NOT REPACKAGE AND CLAIM IT AS CREATION.
About WordNet - WordNet - About WordNet - WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. - MUST REVIEW AND SEE HOW TO USE WITH RAPIDMINER FOR SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

Links for May 29th through June 5th

2012-06-05T17:00:00Z

These are my links for May 29th through June 5th:

Spain Warns Market Access Being Shut - WSJ.com - In making this dramatic admission, Mr. Montoro joined recent calls by the Spanish government for direct aid from European Union institutions for Spanish banks as the government hopes to avoid a full-blown bailout package. - TIP OF THE ICEBERG FOR SPAIN
Retreat From Stock Market Continues - NYTimes.com - “I’m just extremely skeptical about the ability of a retail purchaser to be able to play on a level field in the market,” said Mr. Tsesis, who is 45 and lives in Chicago. “I’m just trying to get out of stocks.” - CONTRARIAN INDICATOR?

Links for May 22nd through May 25th

2012-05-25T17:00:00Z

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.

Seasonal Investing

2012-05-22T11:38:23Z

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!

Links for March 22nd through May 17th

2012-05-18T17:00:00Z

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

Don't fight the Government JPM!

2012-05-18T13:47:58Z

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.

The line in the sand

2012-05-17T13:45:24Z

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.