It’s easy to miss things. However, we simply don’t have enough time to do everything. I like burgers, and I usually use this blog as an excuse to talk about them. Bear with me for a moment, there is a point to this! Let’s say I wanted to find out the best burger in my…
Category: Macro
Data, General, Macro
Alternative data as the oil industry
by Saeed Amen •
I know how to find a decent burger. I’ll scour the web, I’ll walk around, I’ll ask my friends. If there’s a good burger, I’ll be sure to find it. When it comes to cooking it, well, I’m probably not quite as confident. Sure, I can make a burger. Will it be the best burger,…
Data, Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Alternative data for FX
by Saeed Amen •
I recently visited the USA. I managed to visit a number of different cities. Whilst I was there primarily for work, I managed to squeeze in a few days to look around the various cities I visited. I visited Philadelphia for the first time, and I saw Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, both of…
Events, General, Macro
Oracle of Omaha, Berkshire Hathaway 2019
by Saeed Amen •
The Old Market area of Omaha, harks to an earlier time, with its cobbled stone roads and old West architecture. It is the largest city in Nebraska today, and as “The Gateway to the West” it grew with the railways and today it is still home to the headquarters of Union Pacific the largest railroad…
Data, General, Macro, Python, TCA
New Year’s Quant resolutions
by Saeed Amen •
So this is Christmas / And what have you done? / Another year over / And a new one just begun, as John Lennon once sung. Whilst Christmas is a time to reflect on the past year, the New Year is instead a time to look forward. This may involve New Year’s resolutions, or possibly…
Data, General, Macro
Crowdsourcing in markets
by Saeed Amen •
What is crowdsourcing? If we ask Wikipedia, it tells us that it “is a sourcing model in which individuals or organizations obtain goods and services. These services include ideas and finances, from a large, relatively open and often rapidly-evolving group of internet users; it divides work between participants to achieve a cumulative result.” Within a trading context, how…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Macro
Want to use machine readable news to trade?
by Saeed Amen •
Before the written word, information flow was severely limited. Whatever, wasn’t in human memory was basically lost. To use a computing parallel, it was as if everything was in volatile memory. By constant, having the written word, meant we could store words on long term storage mediums, such as stone, later paper and now digitally.…
Macro
Trading what’s priced in
by Saeed Amen •
If I go to the Burger King (for some reason it sounds better that way, by including the ‘the’), I kind of know what I’ll get. The burger, will likely be a Whopper. Whether I’m in London or New York, the whole Burger King experience is likely to be very similar. The burger should taste…
General, Macro
Correlations and the market
by Saeed Amen •
When I have a burger I feel better. I feel that there is some causation here, in particular because of I’ve got lots of statistical data to justify this! However, in practice, if we look away from burgers and at finance, it’s a bit more difficult to answer the conundrum of causation versus correlation. If…
Foreign Exchange, General, Macro
Fooled by randomness?
by Saeed Amen •
Nassim Talib’s book entitled Fooled by Randomness, is a great read. The central premise is the idea that people mistake randomness for something meaningful. We always want to find an explanation or a cause for something, even if there isn’t one. Markets are inherently noisy. It isn’t always possible to understand “why” a market moved…