YUM

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Tom

Currently long $YUM and loving it, so far.

Loving the R plotting capabilities too!

Posted in R Statistics, Stocks | 3 Comments

Statistics – An Introduction to R

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Tom

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I put Google Ad’s back on this site. Don’t worry, I’m doing this on a temporary basis because I want you guys to help support my book habit! I admit, I’m a book junkie.

These ads, in about 1 1/2 month’s time allowed me, to buy Statistics: An Introduction using R and A Beginner’s Guide to R (Use R) with no cost out of my pocket.  I like to read them in my spare time and will use them to extend my capabilities of using R in Rapidminer, and hopefully more video tutorials later.

Thanks for that guys! I appreciate your support.

Posted in Products, R Statistics, RapidMiner | 1 Comment

Long CSX

Posted on March 16, 2011 by Tom

I’m still long $CSX, even after all this nuttiness in the market.  I didn’t get stopped out yesterday and actually closed up.  Trend trading is a whole different ball game indeed.

Posted in R Statistics, Stocks | Leave a comment

Best of Neural Market Trends – February 2011

Posted on March 8, 2011 by Tom

The continuation of the monthly popular links on Neural Market Trends.  I’ll post March 2011′s results early April.

The top 10 posts for February 2011:

  1. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #1 – Introduction To Rapidminer
  2. Calculating Historical Volatility
  3. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #2 – Building a Gold Trend Classification Model Part 1
  4. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #6 – Creating a Decision Tree with Rapidminer 5.0
  5. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #10 – Financial Time Series Modeling Part 2
  6. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #11 – Pattern Recognition & Landmarking Plugin
  7. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #3 – Building a Gold Trend Classification Model Part 2
  8. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #8 – Financial Time Series Data Discovery
  9. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #9 – Financial Time Series Modeling Part 1
  10. Genetic Algorithm Excel Addin

The video tutorials reign supreme.

Posted in iMarketing, Links, News | Leave a comment

Best of Neural Market Trends – January 2011

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Tom

I think I’m going to do a monthly link roundup of the most popular posts on Neural Market Trends, as a way to see how popular R and Rapidminer is.  You should note that I didn’t really start posting about R and Rapidminer till March 2011, so this post and February’s will be the “control” group.

The top 10 posts for January 2011:

  1. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #1 – Introduction To Rapidminer
  2. Calculating Historical Volatility
  3. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #2 – Building a Gold Trend Classification Model Part 1
  4. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #11 – Pattern Recognition & Landmarking Plugin
  5. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #10 – Financial Time Series Modeling Part 2
  6. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #8 – Financial Time Series Data Discovery
  7. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #6 – Creating a Decision Tree with Rapidminer 5.0
  8. Genetic Algorithm Excel Addin
  9. Rapidminer 5.X Video Tutorial #12 – Using the Generate Attribute Operator to Create Trading Rules
  10. Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #9 – Financial Time Series Modeling Part 1

You can see that the most popular posts are my tutorials.

Posted in iMarketing, Links, News | 1 Comment

R and Rapidminer Together = Disruptive Technology!

Posted on March 5, 2011 by Tom

I’ve been teaching myself R now that I finally got Rapidminer’s R plugin to work.  It’s  pretty slick program and easy to learn, I’ve picked up so many things quickly.  I extensively use the PerformanceAnalytics, Quantmod, and tseries packages for R and on top of that, I started to recreate A Physicist on Wall Street’s awesome Rapidminer + R Example for Trading tutorial. So far so good.

It’s fantastic that I can now download stock quotes, using the R plugin, right into Rapidminer and then model those time series.  Yes the native R software has a few learning algorithms, but they in no way match Rapidminer’s breadth and depth.  That, and with Rapidminer’s ability to handle large data sets effeciently, and R’s statistical analytic and graphing powers, makes the Rapidminer and R combination a disruptive technology in my book.

Download it today, play with it, it will make your data shine in ways you can only dream of.

Posted in R Statistics, RapidMiner | Leave a comment

Slick Stock Charts in R

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Tom

I’m picking up R really fast!  I made these simple charts in like 10 minutes!  Of course my code could be better, but its a start for yours truly.

 

Now if only I can get R to work with Rapidminer then I’d start downloading stock data on the fly, but no matter how hard I try I can’t get it work!! Well no matter, I’ll be getting a new laptop tomorrow so I’ll try to configure it again.

Got it work, FINALLY!  Let the data manipulation in Rapidminer begin.

Posted in Data Visualization, R Statistics, RapidMiner | 4 Comments

Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #14 – Web Mining Financial Web Sites – Part 1

Posted on February 28, 2011 by Tom

In this Rapidminer Video Tutorial I show the user how to use the web crawling and text mining operators to download 4 web pages, build a word frequency list, and then check out the similarities between the web sites.

[flashvideo file=wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Rapidminer5-Vid14.mp4 /]

Hat tip to Neil at Vancouver.blogspot.com and the Rapid-I team.

 

Posted in RapidMiner, Text Mining, Tutorials, Video | 2 Comments

Quantmod Package in R

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Tom

I finally discovered the quantmod package for R, and I’m finally getting around to learning the darn software.  I think I’m going to abandon learning Python because R appears to do everything that I needit to do, AND it just so happens to be integrated with Rapidminer.

Check out this simple graph I created of $XOM using R.  It took me two lines of code to generate it.

getSymbols("XOM")
chartSeries(XOM)

 

Posted in R Statistics, RapidMiner | 2 Comments

Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorial #13 – Parameter Optimization

Posted on February 26, 2011 by Tom

In this Rapidminer Video Tutorial I show the user how to use the Parameter Optimization operator to optimize your trained data.  The example shows how Rapidminer iterates the learning rate and momentum for a Neural Net Operator to increase the performance of the trained data set.

[flashvideo file=wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Rapidminer5-Vid13.mp4 /]

Video #14 will be about web mining financial text data.

Posted in RapidMiner, Video | Leave a comment

Suspending Forum Member Registration Temporarily

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Tom

I’m temporarily suspending my forum member registration because I’m getting bombarded by spammers.  They register and then try to post spam. As a failsafe the spam gets caught up in the moderation queue but it takes up too much of my time to weed through the real posts and the crap.

So if you’re not a spammer and want to join the forum, drop me an email and let me know who you are and why you want to join.  I’ll let you in the backdoor.

PS: In case you haven’t been around, I’m actually answering forum posts again.

PPS: If you’ve registered and have zero posts, be prepared to be deleted.

Posted in Forums | 3 Comments

Silver and American Eagles

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Tom

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. My approach to coin to 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.

For those readers who live under rocks, the price for gold and silver has been on a tear upwards over the past few years.  There have been a few scary pullbacks, but the overall trend is still higher.  Overtime these trends tend to attract the “dumb money” and I suspect its happening now.

Why? Well the US mint suspended production of the 2010 Silver American Eagle due to unprecedented demand! Granted this is old news but the 2011 Silver American Eagle won’t be available till July 2011.

This comes right after the suspension of the 2010 Gold American Eagle and the discontinuation of fractional Gold American Eagle coins.

The trick is knowing when to sell your gold and silver,  but in all honesty I’d have a hard time giving up my Eagles. They’re so shiny and preciousssssss.

Posted in Numismatics, Sliver | 2 Comments