More BS for "Butter in Bangladesh" Fans
If you Google the phrase "Butter in Bangladesh" you find pages of people talking about a gag paper from 1994, called "Stupid Data Miner Tricks: Overfitting the S&P 500". It grew up to be a chapter...
View ArticleThe Mother of All Money Charts
Randall Munroe, the XKCD.com physicist cartoonist turned essayist & artist does some amazing work. His cartoons started out with stick figures telling science jokes, but now he works large -...
View ArticleSo Much For Mining Twitter Sentiment For Picking Stocks
Mining Twitter for picking stocks has crashed and burned in London. DCM Capital started a "Twitter Fund" in July 2011 with respectable assets, reported up to 20M pounds. Derwins had a secret sauce to...
View ArticleCan Too Much Market Complexity Cost investors? Yeah.
Back in the good old days markets had a small number of easily identified moving parts. NYSE listed names traded almost entirely at the NYSE. Likewise for NASDAQ stocks. Now markets have many more...
View ArticleThe HFT Empire Strikes Back! The Case That Ever Faster Markets are Good for...
The transformation of markets into ever higher speed networks with bleeding-edge HFT firms moving in microseconds on dozens of diverse market fragments (more or less, what we used to call "exchanges")...
View ArticleMining Twitter Sentiment For Stocks Dies in London, OK at the SEC, Scary in...
Mining Twitter for picking stocks has crashed and burned in London, gotten the nod from the SEC, and caused yet another gut-wrenching lesson in the dangers of electronic markets. DCM Capital started a...
View ArticleMarket Pictures PETA Doesn't Want You To See
The floor of the NYSE is pretty sparsely populated these days. This is true for all the floors of the remaining "traditional exchanges" - i.e .those where much of the trading was done by meat machines...
View ArticleBig Data Gets Bigger: Now Google Trends Can Predict The Market
Yesterday three economists, (Tobias Preis of Warwick Business School in the U.K., Helen Susannah Moat of University College London, and H. Eugene Stanley of Boston University) published an eye-opening...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Big Data For Predicting the Market: Deep Dive and Current...
Last Friday's post, "Big Data Gets Bigger: Now Google Trends Can Predict the Market", sleuthed out a likely reason why almost the same approach tried by the new paper's authors a few years back just...
View ArticleA Great First Week for the Google Trends Market Signal. Next Prediction Here!
Last week's post,Google Trends Deep Dive and Current Predictions, opened up the hood on the previous description of how a group of academics, looking at data that went up on to 2011, were able to make...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Stock Market Calls: Batting 1000, But It's Early In The Season
Last week's post reported on the correct "Dow Up" prediction from the Google Trends prediction. The method was described in the posts preceding that, the first describing the new "Big Data" flavor of...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Market Prediction On A Roll: Three For Three. What's The Call...
Last weel's post, "Google Trends Stock Market Calls: Batting 1000, But It's Still Early In the Season", closed with the latest prediction that the market, measured by the DJIA would be up again this...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Prediction Streak Ends At 3 Out Of 4 -- Calls Market Up For...
Last week, for the fourth week in a row, the Google Trends US Market Preditctor called for another up week on the DJIA. This was the same prediction we'd seen for the previous three weeks, correct in...
View ArticleOne Half Second of HFT: Watch Big Data Dance
Up until the last few minutes of trading, it looked like the Google Trends indicator was back in the saddle, headed for a fourth correct call out of five, but the market gave up all of the Friday's...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Market Prediction: A Bad Week, But Still Trying
My old pal Bob was here last week to cheer on the NHL's San Jose Sharks in game 7 of their 3-3 tied series with the LA Kings. He's got season tickets, and more than one official Sharkie Jersey, But it...
View ArticleFor The Eternal Optimist File: Trader Whose Twitter-Based Hedge Fund Failed...
In the past I've written about thesorry results from investment strategies driven by Twitter,such as the London based firm, Derwent CapitalManagement, that started with with 20 million pounds in 2011,...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Market Prediction: Right Again. Correct On 80% Of The Calls
This was another winning week for the Google Trends Market Predictor. I've been reporting these weekly calls before the open on Monday, however this week real life intervened, so it it coming out now,...
View ArticleGoogle Trends Market Prediction. Wrong Last Week, Batting 670. Still Says...
Last week, the Google Trends Market Prediction was looking like the Rookie of the Year. A little less so this week. The forecast was for the DJIA to be up last week. How did that work out? Not so well....
View ArticleGoogle Trends Stock Market Prediction Gets A Trip To The Shop, Calls A Down Week
Read 'em and weep, Financial Social Media Buffs. The Google Trends Market Predictor pointed up, the market tanked. The Predictor has been in happy land for 7 straight weeks. Mostly, so has the market....
View ArticleThe Problem With The Google Trends Market Prediction Data
Greetings Social Media in Financial Prediction fans. The attentive reader will recall that last time we became suspicious about the data underlying the basic Google Trends Market Predictor, based on...
View ArticleInvesting On The News: By The Time You Read It, It's Too Late
An old market maxim was "buy on the rumor, sell on the news". Like many old maxims, there turned out to be a lot of truth in this. Back in the good old days your broker Bernie would tell you this right...
View ArticleMaking Money On The New News, Strictly Legally
The last post, Investing On The News: By The Time You Read It, It's Too Late , even though it attracted fewer views than a snake's ass in a drain pipe, passed on some pretty grim conventional academic...
View ArticleInvesting On The News, Before It Happens - Legally
Recent posts have dealt with standard and improved ways of extracting investment signals from news. All well and good, but you can do much better if you can the the news before it happens. For some...
View ArticleStupid Data Miner Tricks: Predicting The Market With Pro Golfers
As part of this blog's continuing coverage of wacky ways to predict the market, you've heard about the some remarkable but meaningless correlations that seem to predict the market, especially if you...
View ArticleNot A Stupid Data Miner: The Mystery Of Markets And Golf Updated
In the last post, Stupid Data Miner Tricks: Predicting The Market With Pro Golfers. I implicitly lumped the idea and its author, Kevin Armstrong, a distinguished investment pro, the former chairman of...
View ArticleOops They Did It Again. Market Technology Bites Back At NASDAQ
If you owned most of the world's largest computers, what would you do with them? For market regulators, not much. The Flash Crash, and an ongoing series of mini-crashes, some upward, made many...
View ArticleMarkets and Golf: It Works! But You Need A Bookie, Not A Broker
A prior post, "Not a Stupid Data Miner: The Mystery of Markets and Golf Updated",clarified Kevin Armstrong's latest prediction - that, against long odds of 11-4, the European women's team would defeat...
View ArticlePrediction Isn't Just About Stocks. Predictive Persuasion
Prediction isn't just for the stock market. Trading is just one of many ways to cash in on quantitative foresight. For mass marketing - and even presidential campaigns - it's another story. In those...
View ArticleOracle Team USA Gets Big Data Wet
An interviewer asked Oracle CEO Larry Ellison if it was worth spending $100 million to win the America's Cup. Ellison answered that it was much better than spending $100 million to lose the America's...
View ArticleBig Wet Data On The Oracle Team USA Boat - More Details
The last post, Oracle Team USA Gets Big Data Wet, was a fanboy rave on the 34th America's Cup, which saw Oracle's rise from the (near) ashes of an 8-1 deficit to Team New Zealand, winning eight races...
View ArticleWhat JP Morgan's Whale Trade, Warren Buffett and Rube Goldberg Tell Us About...
How is it possible for JP Morgan (NYSE:JPM), the bank with the best reputation on the Street for having a handle on risk control, to still be guessing about how much damage was done by the...
View ArticleStupid Data Miner Tricks: How Quants Fool Themselves And The Economic...
There sometimes seems to be no limit to how far people will go to make financial data scream. You can find strong statistics, and useless investment signals from butter production in Bangladesh, the US...
View ArticleRicher than all the Rich Lists Combined
This may look complicated, but it's a brick compared to FPML. I got an invitation to an upcoming event about the $650 Trillion swap market. That is not chump change. You could add up all the Richest...
View ArticleAnother Tech Glitch Roils Markets -- How Simulation Could Help
It was a Maalox morning for traders Wednesday. Adequate testing could save us all a lot of stress. (Photo credit: Associated Press) Oops, we did it again. The Flash Crash was the poster child for bad...
View ArticleDoes The Stock Market Need Real-Time Rehab?
Wednesday was not the best day for the U.S. stock market. It provided another example of why we might want to have centralized real-time monitoring of markets, like the FAA does with air traffic....
View ArticleHFT comes to dominate markets in five years, in living color
Five years of HFT, day by day. Source: Nanex Here's one of the best, most visually compelling and most informative of the many stories, including my own, about how the markets have changed becuase of...
View ArticleStupid Data Miner Tricks Redux: How Quants Fool Themselves And The Truth...
So far these posts have been about: Electronic markets, and their ongoing pesky behavior. Why adding more computer nerds to federal market squad is a good idea (see above) Big Data - how AI click...
View ArticleAlgos That Learn, And Show Off To Music
VideoAlgorithms aren't carved in stone. They can show remarkable learning behavior. We see this in subtle ways, in the way "Big Data" is used to refine the ads we see, and the way a site like Amazon...
View ArticleBig Data, Fast Markets
The race to the bottom in latency accelerates. The SEC is having a confab in DC, moved from Sept 14 to Oct 2 to talk tech. Bring your own lunch. During a recent book talk, I was interviewed about the...
View ArticleYour Own Big Data Lookin' at You
Some people aren't happy with the ever growing stream of big data available on the general population. Some of these people are pissed off, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started by Mitch...
View ArticleGetting Up Close with Big Data: Part One
The post on Big Data for web advertising as the "New Frontier" for methods used in quant trading and AI was one of the most read - though a distant second to the Stupid Data Miner Tricks: The Economic...
View ArticleWhat Do 'Honey Boo Boo' Fans Buy? Down and Dirty with Big Data, Part 2
My last post, "Getting Up Close With Big Data," featured some examples of what the wizards at Rocket Fuel know about people and their interests based on whether they search for information on contact...
View ArticleThe Virgin Slut Algorithm: Wired Markets Get Even Weirder
I hear that blog posts with sexy titles get read more. I think it's true; my most popular one is "The Economic Indicator in Your Pants." The research continues here. A single "virgin slut" algorithm...
View ArticleSandy inspires a good market decision
The NYSE, NASDAQ and the other US stock markets all made a wise decision to take rain days on Monday and Tuesday. Self Regulation at its best! At first, the word was that the electronic markets,...
View ArticleNate Silver And The Power Of Small Data
It’s getting hard to find the word “data” without “big” slapped in front of it. I’ve written once or twice about big data myself on this very site. But enough is enough. Not all data is big. There is...
View ArticleFast Times at the SEC
The big news this week at the SEC was the announced departure of chairperson Mary Shapiro, and turning the Mixmaster to succeed her up to "11" on the Spinal Tap scale. It took over a year to find a...
View ArticleFast Trading South of the Border: Is Mexico Set For A New Market High?
The Mexican stock market is ripe for both asset appreciation and electronic trading. I spoke at an unusually well-run and meaty RiskMathics event on Algorithmic and High Frequency Trading recently in...
View ArticleThe New Fish Eats the Old Fish: NYSE Floor Wake Photos
If headlines still came in jumbo type, today's would be screaming about the 6 year-old ICE buying the 220 year-old NYSE. The NYSE floor is located diagonally across the street from the Museum of...
View ArticleVintage Predictions from the Vault - That Came True!
In the course of some year-end office tidying, I found a book from 1981, America What Went Wrong, by Donald Bartlett and James B. Steele. They're Pulitzer Prize winning reporters for the Philadelphia...
View ArticleMore Stock Exchange Wake Photos - UK Edition
A few readers wrote in to say how much they enjoyed the Wake Photos for the NYSE Floor. It's a long holiday, so here are a pair of classic before-and-after photos of the London Stock Exchange floor,...
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