Whenever we eat something, understanding the ingredients which have gone into a dish is important. Is it organic? Is it fresh or frozen? Have the food and vegetables been grown in a sustainable way? What is the quality of the produce? There are many questions we might seek to ask. When it come to…
Category: Data
Data, General, Python
Backtesting in Python
by Saeed Amen •
If I want to know how a burger tastes like in a restaurant, I’ll go there and eat it. However, let’s say I want to know how a burger tasted from a particular restaurant tasted like in 2015? I can’t go back in time. Or let’s say I want to know how every burger joint…
Data, General
More than data is needed for insights
by Saeed Amen •
If you’re building a house, what’s important? You need an architect to design the house alongside civil engineers. You need builders to, well, build the house. Of course, you could try your hand at some of these tasks, but it’s going to be a very steep learning curve. It’s also one thing trying your hand…
Data, General, Python
Benefits of learning Python for traders
by Saeed Amen •
In the world of burgers, there aren’t really many buzzwords. Maybe for the very fancy burgers, they might have wagyu beef or something exotic like that (and no, those burgers aren’t any better). However, by and large there’s only so much you can do to a burger to make it different. Ultimately it needs a…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Crypto markets from an FX perspective
by Saeed Amen •
It’s fifty years since the Bretton Woods system collapsed. Given that I’ve been working in FX my whole career, I suspect I should be thankful to Nixon for that! There’s a great article by Chris Marsh which discusses this, and I strongly recommend having a read of it. Also recently I read an article by…
Data, General
The unknowns in markets and alt data
by Saeed Amen •
Every year that passes, it seems to become clearer that there is even more I don’t know, in particular those areas where I’ve worked the most, financial markets. If it’s a new area, then it’s a lot easier to assume you know than you know, because you are shielded from a lot of the complexities.…
Data, General, Macro
So what can NLP do for financial firms?
by Saeed Amen •
There’s more than one meaning for NLP, which you might encounter. If you Google it, one of these is Neuro Linguistic Programming, and techniques of communicating with other folks. Well this post is absolutely nothing to do that! Instead, it’s to do with the NLP, which occupies more of my time, natural language processing. In…
Data, General, Python
Working with time series in Python
by Saeed Amen •
In the dim and distant past (let’s call this 2007!) if you wanted to work with time series, you might have to resort to writing your own time series library. When I say a “time series library”, I’m not really talking about any sophisticated techniques for manipulating time series. Instead, I’m talking about ways of…
Data, General, Macro
Quantifying Politics
by Saeed Amen •
We all know that politics impacts markets. However, it can be tricky to understand how to quantify political risk and use it as an input in the investing process. Here we take an updated look at the returns from applying Thorfinn’s political indices to trade a basket of macro assets. During our sample period from…
Data, General, Python
Downloading Bloomberg data with findatapy
by Saeed Amen •
If I say burger, you’ll probably think of several things, maybe McDonald’s or Burger King for starters. They are the ubiquitous purveyors of all things burger related wherever you are in the world. Sure, there are other burger joints, but they don’t have the same wide reach as the massive chains like Burger King. I…