From The NY Times email newsletter. On Friday, the National Association of Realtors, the industry group that has enforced the rules that led to the 6 percent commission, agreed to change its behavior as part of an agreement to settle several lawsuits. The settlement is important in its own right. Americans now spend about $100 billion a year on commissions. That number will probably decline by between $20 billion and $50 billion, Steve Brobeck, the former head of the Consumer Federation of America, told my colleague Debra Kamin. Read more...

I wrote an article about Microsoft integrating Python in Excel. I love the idea and I think it’s going finally get machine learning into the hands of Excel users. Check out this tutorial on how to use SciKit-Learn in Excel from Anaconda. The new Python in Excel integration by Microsoft and Anaconda grants access to the entire Python ecosystem for data science and machine learning. Thanks to its direct connection to Anaconda Distribution, we can leverage built-in functionality with packages like NumPy, pandas, Seaborn, and scikit-learn directly within our Excel workbooks. Read more...

An older link from April 2017 that I believe became AutoGluon. AutoGluon is fantastic for time series and a host of other AutoML use cases. So, what models do we include in our ensemble? Pretty much any reasonable model we can get our hands on! Specific models include variants on many well-known approaches, such as the Bass Diffusion Model, the Theta Model, Logistic models, bsts, STL, Holt-Winters and other Exponential Smoothing models, Seasonal and other other ARIMA-based models, Year-over-Year growth models, custom models, and more. Read more...

Markets had an interesting week, especially if you were trading the #AI stocks like NVDA and AMD. Both of those darlings sold off. NVDA looks to be firming up but it’s too early to tell. AMD is heading lower and I expect it to test the $180 level. I’d become a buyer around there. After transferring my brokerage account over to Interactive Brokers (referral link), I put on a single #options trade. Read more...

It looks like the old LibSVM library is still kicking around and being updated. Last release was a bug fix on July 2023. Version 3.32 released on July 9, 2023. We fix some minor bugs. Plus changes how to use in Python: > pip install -U libsvm-official The python directory is re-organized so >>> from libsvm.svmutil import * instead of >>> from svmutil import * Via Webpage

Source: Reddit

An oldie but goodie. Regular Expressions are a must for anybody using Python, doing Data Science, or just ETL’ing data. Regular expressions (regex) are essentially text patterns that you can use to automate searching through and replacing elements within strings of text. This can make cleaning and working with text-based data sets much easier, saving you the trouble of having to search through mountains of text by hand. Via Dataquest

I sat out most of the week because I was transferring my brokerage account from TD Ameritrade to Interactive Brokers (referral link). It took 3 days to move everything over and today (Thursday) I made my first diagonal options trade. I bought a Jul 21 MSFT $405 put and sold a Mar 21 MSFT $410 put. The plan is to hold the July put till about June and sell weekly puts to get premium. Read more...

I saw this on r/algotrading and cracked up. The reality is that there is no such thing as an easy buck or easy riches. You can get rich by luck but building wealth is hard. Easy bucks can disappear and they usually do. If you manage it right, wealth can stick around for a long time.

This is a neat comparison of how green California got from the recent heavy rains. https://twitter.com/DrewTumaABC7/status/1767236370706403538 CALIFORNIA October 2023 vs. March 2024🛰️ pic.twitter.com/iN0vOfuF9t — Drew Tuma (@DrewTumaABC7) March 11, 2024 California might become greener but will experience severe weather due to climate change.