There’s probably something innately human about wanting to be right about a prediction. If I get a burger, I especially hope that it’ll be a fantastic burger. Sometimes it is, and I feel a sense of vindication. Other times, maybe not. The downside isn’t exactly a big deal, just a lousy meal, and hopefully, they’ll…
Category: General
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Markets and their seasons
by Saeed Amen •
Over the past few weeks, spring has arrived, in what has been a very challenging period across many countries in the world. Looking outside, it’s a time of new beginnings, thankfully making a change from the past few months of winter. Markets have their seasons too. Some might actually mirror the actual seasons outside. …
Data, General, Python
Data scientists and coding
by Saeed Amen •
Data scientists code. There’s nothing controversial about this statement. Without coding you’d be limited to the types of tools you can use to analyze data, such as Excel. However, with coding we have access to libraries like pandas to work with time series, scikit-learn to do machine learning and so on, to build models. In…
General, Macro
Unwinding isn’t always relaxed
by Saeed Amen •
Does there always have to be a reason? When it comes to financial markets, even if there isn’t a reason, folks will try and explain one. Ah, that move, that was Middle East buying. Oh no, perhaps, it was China. However, often there can be a good reason to explain a move, and slowly it…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Mind the gap risk
by Saeed Amen •
Financial markets are not generally open continually. Cryptocurrency markets by contrast, are open all the time. If you want to trade Bitcoin over the weekend you can. There are also various weekend markets on some smaller platforms, where you can speculate on assets like Dow Jones. If a market is closed and a big market…
Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
An option room with a view
by Saeed Amen •
Let’s say I want a burger. The easiest way to have a burger in a restaurant is to order one, right? Alternatively, we could order the whole menu, which happens to have a burger in it. We’ll end up eating a lot more, but I suppose we’ll still get to the same objective. In…
Data, General, Python
Installing Python for financial data science
by Saeed Amen •
What’s the most important part of a holiday? Well, if you can’t get to the airport on time, it’s unlikely you’ll be going anywhere. When it comes to learning Python, the most important thing is to install Python in the first place! So how do you install Python, together with all the libraries you…
Data, General, Python
Visualization in Python
by Saeed Amen •
What’s one of the most important part of analyzing financial markets, or data science in general? There are several answers. If you don’t have any data to start with, there’s not really going to be more to analyze. Once you get the data, it needs to be cleaned, before the analysis etc. Once all the…
General, Python
Common problems when learning Python
by Saeed Amen •
I’ve been teaching Python for a while. Whilst, it is one of the easier programming languages, it still takes time to learn, if you’ve never coded before. Whichever way you try to learn whether through books or lectures, you’ll need to spend even more time practicing your Python coding in order to get to grip…
Foreign Exchange, General, Python
Using vaex to do Python calcs with 30x speed up
by Saeed Amen •
Within finance, time series data is usually the bedrock of most analysis. If we’re using Python, what are the best ways to analyse this data? In this article, I discuss the various time series library available in Python. In particular, I focus on the vaex library in Python for dealing with large time series datasets,…