Any building is made of many materials. Some will be pretty much common to every building, such as glass. Other materials will be more specific. Take for example bricks, they are fairly common in residential buildings. However, these days it is fairly unusual to see the outer walls of a skyscraper made of bricks. Instead,…
Category: General
Data, General
Combining different data sources
by Saeed Amen •
I used to like Lego when I was a kid. Perhaps a part of me still does. Forget about nostalgia too, the Lego sets available these days are much better than I was a kid. Some Lego sets are exceptionally detailed copies of major buildings, cars etc. They are also considerably more expensive than I…
Data, General
Legal aspects of alt data
by Saeed Amen •
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…
General, Python
Notepad, Jupyter or IDEs for financial research?
by Saeed Amen •
I travelled on a plane for the first time in 18 months recently. It felt kind of similar to before, aside from things like masks, and the packing took a lot longer than before. But in all, I really enjoyed going on holiday, and I think I appreciated being away a lot more than in…
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…
General
Eight years of independence
by Saeed Amen •
LinkedIn can be pretty talkative sometimes, putting up notification after notification, most of which, you’ll probably end up ignoring. However, from time to time, there might well be a notification which really does make you think. This week a notification popped up telling me that it’s been eight years since I started working independent. I…
Foreign Exchange, General
Building single currency models?
by Saeed Amen •
It takes time to research financial markets. From a quant point of view, the aim is always to build models which are generalised, which can work for many assets, whether they are indicators, trading strategies etc. One such model is a trend following strategy. The same trend following algorithm can be applied to futures across…