Try to think of the “buzziest”, buzzwords you can think of. Support vector machines? No. Random Forests? No. However, group these together (and much more) under the umbrella of “machine learning”, and suddenly we have created a buzzword! The basic idea of many of the techniques which underpin machine learning is find relationships between variables. In particular,…
Category: Data
Data, General
Crowdsourcing alpha (with consultants?)
by Saeed Amen •
San Francisco is nearly 2000 miles further away from London than New York. However, despite that, San Francisco sometimes feels closer to home. Whilst there are some high rise buildings in San Francisco, these are restricted to a relatively small area around the financial district. Much of the city consists of low rise housing, just…
Data, General
Mies, hard work, simplicity & trading
by Saeed Amen •
“Architecture starts when you carefully put two bricks together. There it begins.” That’s a quotation from Ludvig Mies van der Rohe, the famous German-American architect. I recently visited one of his buildings, his famous Barcelona Pavilion, which is partially pictured above. Whilst the scene might look exceptionally modern, the original building was erected in 1929…
Data
Learn from data scientists everywhere
by Saeed Amen •
It is claimed that the burger was invented in 1895, in a restaurant called Louis’ Lunch in New Haven in Connecticut. There are of course other counterclaims (my own personal belief, for which I’ve found very little evidence, is that it has something to do with the city of Hamberg). However, what is certain is…
Data
An alternative data meal needs to be cooked
by Saeed Amen •
Cooking is perhaps not my forte. My culinary abilities do not extend much beyond extremely simple dishes, but I’m nevertheless trying to improve, with the help of Jamie Oliver (well, his new book “5 ingredients” which seems to have been written for people like myself). I can rustle up a simple omelette. I can bake…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Macro
The right type of market forecast
by Saeed Amen •
Every so often when I was working in a bank, someone would ring up, and ask me what our 5 year EUR/USD forecast was. Trying to create such a long term “forecast” is indeed very difficult. One way is to use a valuation model such as PPP, which attempts to gauge long term fair value.…
Data, General, Python
Quant skills for discretionary traders
by Saeed Amen •
Fashion is one of those things I think I might follow. In practice, the only times I end up being fashionable, is when the fashion world somehow meanders back to my taste. I used to wear a Casio G-Shock watch for many years, which I admit was hopelessly unfashionable for most of that time. Then…
Data, General, Macro
The gorilla & Radiohead in the backtest room
by Saeed Amen •
A couple of years ago I remember visiting the opening of an art exhibition in Amsterdam, with a few of my friends from university. I can’t really recall many of the paintings, probably more a function of my memory, rather than the art itself. One thing I do recall was a painting a living room,…
Data, General
Mistakes when backtesting trading strategies
by Saeed Amen •
You know how it feels. Time has come and gone, and still no progress. Then hours later, you’ve found the mistake, and you’re absolutely kicking yourself. Coding is very much a case of trial and error. You just need enough stubbornness not to give up to get your code to run properly. Most of the…
Data, General
Quant trading strategies which float
by Saeed Amen •
I had many different types of toys. My favourite was Lego. It was kind of cool (and even cooler these days judging by the ever wackier Lego sets you can buy these days). You can create a new toy each day out of Lego. All you needed was some imagination. However, there was always an…