In the realm of intraday trading, managing and minimizing trading costs is not just a practice; it’s a necessity. A strategy that seems profitable on paper can quickly become a losing proposition when real-world costs, particularly the spread between the bid and ask prices, are factored in. Today, I’d like to share a comprehensive analysis … Continue reading →

Today, I dove into housing data and decided to filter houses based on price to determine how it impacted sales numbers. The graph below illustrates Listings Under Contract up until March. The overall findings are not particularly surprising. Last month, 8,401 listings were under contract, which represents a significant decrease compared to the last 10 … Continue reading →

You may have heard recently Costco decided to start selling gold bars and coins. Here’s how you can get them at less than spot value. Today I logged in to Costco.com. You can see here I can purchase these 1 oz Gold Bar PAMP Suisse Lady Fortuna’s for $2219.99. These same exact gold bars cost … Continue reading →

Fundamental data offers a plethora of data points about a company’s financial health and market position. I want to share a streamlined approach to accessing and storing fundamental data for a wide array of stocks using yfinance, a powerful tool that offers free access to financial data. This Python code leverages yfinance to download fundamental … Continue reading →

If you’re keen on diversifying your investment portfolio with precious metals in physical form, you probably always look for the best deals and try to avoid broker fees. Traditionally, I’ve leaned on APMEX.com for such purchases. It’s a household name for precious metal investors, offering a wide range of metals at competitive prices. Yet, something … Continue reading →

If you read a lot of technical books or want to specifically reference them in the future, then you need to check out ChatGPT’s custom GPT creator. I’m going to show an example of how I upload a PDF of Jack Schwager’s Hedge Fund Market Wizard’s book. I can then query and ask this GPT … Continue reading →

Exploring the realm of custom GPTs opens up a world of possibilities that you might not be aware of yet. For those who haven’t dived into this feature, you’re truly missing out on a significant enhancement to your Chat GPT experience. You can find and access your custom GPTs here. I created my most recent … Continue reading →

Arizona real estate has been pretty flat for a while so I haven’t posted any updates. But there are a few interesting things I noticed this week. Median prices have already exceeded their highs of 2023. This is interesting because this usually occurs a little later in the year. However, average sales prices have not … Continue reading →

The question of when the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates is at the forefront of many investors’ and minds. Given the current economic indicators and futures market trends, there seems to be little chance the FED cuts rates anytime soon. By analyzing the FOMC rate probabilities and market expectations, it’s evident that optimism for … Continue reading →

If you’ve ever downloaded a scanned PDF and tried to search it you’ll quickly realize this isn’t possible. Here is how you can use Python to extract the text from and PDF file and make it searchable.

One of my favorite books for quantitative investing is Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading. However, a lot of these concepts might be difficult for someone who getting started in programming strategies. So I created this Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading GPT which can answer any questions related to this book. While these aren’t perfect responses … Continue reading →

Ok, so Ibonds had a huge rate of return last year. Perhaps you’re like me and you created.. a few hundred accounts. Well, now you have a major problem. You need to get your 1099 statement from each account. With the TreasuryDirect.gov OTP (one-time password) process this can be very time-consuming. Below is my treasury … Continue reading →

Fed Futures have indicated a change in the wind regarding the Federal Reserve’s upcoming policy decisions. While everyone was anticipating rate cuts for the March meeting now seem less likely, with the pendulum swinging from 52.9% to 46.2% in favor of maintaining the current rates. FOMC Rate Probabilities Homebuyers and sellers who have been on … Continue reading →

Recently I was following a paper and in the example they used Pyfolio which is an awesome performance and risk analysis library in Python developed by Quantopian Inc when they were still around. Given that Quantopian is no longer around nobody is maintaining this library. I ran into a few errors and figured I would outline the … Continue reading →

It’s interesting to see people reposting this story, “Mortgage demand surges!” Talk about abusing statistics. This headline is based on mortgage applications which is a week-over-week statistic. Meaning, a huge increase in this as a percentage could simply mean the demand was low the prior week. Also, let’s go back and look at what mortgage … Continue reading →

Recently I was following a paper and in the example they used Pyfolio which is an awesome performance and risk analysis library in Python developed by Quantopian Inc when they were still around. Given that Quantopian is no longer around nobody is maintaining this library. I ran into a few errors and figured I would … Continue reading →

Occasionally I will want to see long-term historical data so I can better interpret the history of something I’m trying to analyze. I wrote some code a while back that analyzes the increased cost of monthly housing payments due to increases in mortgage rates. However, recently I wanted to re-write this code but apply it … Continue reading →

The Offer American Express extended a 0% APR credit card offer to me, valid for 12 months. This card isn’t just about the interest-free period; it also offers approximately 5% cash back on purchases. To his the first bonus you have to spend $5,000 which earns you a $250 bonus. With a credit limit of … Continue reading →

In this time of rising Fed rates, it’s a good time to explore the best spots for your cash. To give you a hand, I’ve compiled some auto-updating options. To summarize: For easy access, high-yield savings accounts are hard to beat. Want to lock in a rate? Consider CDs or government bonds For those who … Continue reading →

Recently, I encountered an unexpected challenge: a water leak beneath the slab of my house. The ordeal had me up until 1 AM, rerouting the line through my attic with PEX piping. Amidst this late-night task, a thought occurred to me: could machine learning and forecasting have helped me detect this leak earlier, based on … Continue reading →

I started off wanting to analyze the sustainability of mortgage buydowns by home builders. But as it happens, my ADHD had other plans. Three weeks later, here we are with code that looks for trends and anomalies in corporate financials. The code generates detailed HTML profiles for in-depth financial analysis of stocks. In a series … Continue reading →

Introduction If you’ve spent any time working with large datasets, especially in scientific computing, machine learning, or finance, you’ve probably come across HDF5 files. But what are they, and why are they so popular for storing complex data structures? In this blog post, we’ll explore the HDF5 file format, its architecture, and its various use-cases. … Continue reading →

In a previous post, I showed how to store symbol data from EODHD. The purpose of this code is to now iterate through all those symbols and grab the corporate financial data from EODHD using their API. If you’re interested in downloading Open, High, Low, Close, Adjusted Cose, and Volume data you can find that in this blog post. Output … Continue reading →

In a previous post, I showed how to store symbol data from EODHD. The purpose of this code is to now iterate through all those symbols and grab the Open, High, Low, Close, Adjustable Close, and Volume data from EODHD using their API. Output This code will contain data for each stock symbol similar to … Continue reading →

If you’re looking to perform complex analyses, backtests, or even develop your own trading algorithms you’re going to need access to good data. What I’m going to show you today is how to use EODHD to get a list of all the exchanges in their database. Then we will use all of the symbols from … Continue reading →

Understanding trends in housing affordability provides crucial insights into financial stability and economic conditions. A key metric to consider is the price-to-payment-to-income ratio. This ratio calculates the burden of mortgage payments on the available income. Over recent years, this ratio has been skyrocketing, indicating a growing financial burden on homeowners. The high price-to-payment-to-income ratio is … Continue reading →

Housing affordability is a critical issue that affects millions of individuals and families. Understanding trends in housing affordability can provide insights into financial stability, economic conditions, and policy impacts. This article presents a Python script that utilizes public data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) API to analyze housing affordability trends. The script retrieves … Continue reading →

I wanted to analyze the relationship between the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) raising or lowering of interest rates and its impact on the S&P 500 and the median house price. I wrote Python code that fetches data from the St. Louis Fed’s FRED API, processes it, and performs various calculations and visualizations. Here is the S&P … Continue reading →

Like many brokers, you don’t get to make unlimited connections to the Alpaca API. What I’m going to set up today is Redis to redistribute Alpaca trades, quotes, and bars data. The purpose of this is so that all of my algorithms have access to Alpaca’s data. This program also shows you how many symbols … Continue reading →

The world of finance and trading has seen a massive surge in the use of technology and data. With the increasing availability of APIs and data streams, it has become essential for traders and developers to harness the power of real-time information to make better-informed decisions. Alpaca, a popular commission-free trading API, is one such … Continue reading →

This is a simple tutorial on how to get started with TWS API from Interactive Brokers and subscribe to a few test symbols to get stock updates in Ubuntu. You need to first install the Trader Workstation client – https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/tws-updateable-latest.php You need to launch the client and login with your credentials. You then need to … Continue reading →

There is always discussion surrounding the trajectory of house prices. At the core of these debates lies the principle of consumer affordability, which is heavily influenced by monthly mortgage payments. I developed a Python program that models the interaction between house prices and mortgage interest rates, utilizing historical data from the FRED (Federal Reserve Economic … Continue reading →

If you manage multiple accounts through TreasuryDirect.gov to purchase T-bills, T-notes, T-bonds, TIPS, FRNs, or C of I certificates then you know how antiquated and difficult it can be to manage all of your accounts at the United States Treasury. I’ve written a Python program to aggregate all of these accounts into a single summary … Continue reading →

In the realm of algorithm analysis, it is easy to become preoccupied with testing on actual datasets where variables remain unknown. However, to assess algorithms for speed and accuracy, one can generate known synthetic data and evaluate how closely the algorithms approximate the actual values and how quickly the calculations are performed. This approach serves … Continue reading →

I was running some machine learning models and was struggling to find a metric that could capture errors relative to volatility in the underlying model that I was trying to predict so I created MARDE. Commonly used metrics like Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Mean Squared Error (MSE), and R-squared (R2) … Continue reading →

As the Federal Reserve recently bailed out the wealthy bankers once again, the Bank Term Funding (BTFP) has been pushing the Fed’s balance sheet up from $8,342T on March 8 to $8,733T on March 22. This bailout is supposedly a short-term lending program, but with the banks’ financial houses in disarray, one can’t help but … Continue reading →

Good episode on trading the order book and scalping treasuries with John Grady. Here’s the Youtube video he references on his trading. Here is his Twitter feed. Tweets by NoBSDayTrading

If you’re like me sometimes you’ll have a PDF file that you want to listen to passively while you’re doing something else. Here’s some Python code I put together to convert a PDF file to MP3 using Google Colab and Python. This script can either process one PDF file that you select or process an … Continue reading →

I’m working on creating some 3d models of properties that I’m interested in purchasing. In order to do this I need a bunch of JPG files to import them into Open Drone Map. This will create 3d renderings as well as topographic maps. The issue is I only have videos from my DJI. I didn’t … Continue reading →

The real estate market hasn’t only cooled but it appears to be pretty frozen. What I’m looking at is the contract ratio. This essentially is the number of houses under contract divided by the number of active listings on the market. First, let’s look at October compared to previous Octobers going back to 2017. Houses … Continue reading →

The new CPI report came out today. at a .43% monthly increase. This means I-bonds starting November first will only yield 6.472% October 28th is the last day to purchase I-bonds at a 9.62% APY. Here are some things you need to know. Yield The 9.62% yield is only for the next 6-months. I-bonds get … Continue reading →

As I look over the real estate numbers in Arizona this week, I noticed that people are asking on average about 15% more than what houses sell for. In fact, we had 4,427 price cuts last week alone. This is 23% of the 19,225 houses available for sale. You can see from the average sales … Continue reading →

The real estate market continues to get wrecked by the FED rate increases. From a valuation perspective. But most people I would argue don’t care about the price of a house as much as they do about the monthly payment. This is a combination of price and interest rate. So I wanted to create a … Continue reading →

Price cuts last week just went to their highest level in years. This is a horrible sign for things to come in Arizona. But it gets worse… Active weekly listings are also at their highest level in years. In 2019 there were 18,562 houses for sale. We now exceeded that with 18,605 last week. Meaning … Continue reading →

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Six months ago some had the opinion, ‘this time is different. Their primary argument was that supply didn’t exist so housing prices could not fall that significantly. I always pushed back, you don’t know how many people are holding second or third houses as rentals. Or how many people bought Airbnb properties because ‘houses always … Continue reading →

People are still slashing their listing prices. It increased to its highest level this week, 4,172. This will continue to put huge downward pressure on prices. We have exactly 3 months of supply also going to put downward pressure on prices. The number I’m waiting for this to break is 3.9. Once this happens will … Continue reading →

Call me crazy…But I believe affordability is the primary driver of housing prices. Mortgage rates determine payment. And payment determines affordability. This is rough rough rough math. But based on the inverse correlation between rates and housing prices you could easily derive from this chart a 30% drop in prices everything else being equal. Buyers … Continue reading →

Price cuts continue to accelerate. Sellers are panicking. Typical at the top of a bull run. This is not good for housing prices. Inventory and months of supply are back to Jun 2019 levels. Albeit minimal the price per square foot is now lower than where it was a year ago meaning the one year … Continue reading →

The publicly advertised rate for I Bonds according to the Treasury Direct website is 9.62% if they were or are purchased between May and October of 2022. But what people do not realize is that an I Bond issue month is the same regardless if you purchase it on the first day of the month … Continue reading →

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My Cromford access has been restored. I can now bore you with housing statistics. The Fed will burn down everything until they get inflation under control, no asset is safe. From WSJ: The overall tone of the minutes suggests “the Fed upgraded the inflation problem to a five-alarm fire,” said Omair Sharif, an economist and … Continue reading →

I’m fixated on this chart. I always used to underestimate the psychological aspect of investing. But it plays an important role in any tradable asset. This chart represents the number of houses in Arizona that have cut their listing price. What do you think the mentality is of this individual? Sit and think about it. … Continue reading →

The Fed is deathly afraid of inflation. At the beginning of the year, they announced they would unwind QE and raise interest rates. This was a clear sign to me that it was time to unload real estate. I will publish updates on the market weekly as it appears to be deteriorating in Arizona.

If you’ve installed solar and you live within the monopoly of SRP then you know what kind of racket they are running over there. You spend tens of thousands of dollars to do your part on making Arizona’s electric grid more reliable. In turn, SRP hits you with these absurd “on-peak demand charges”. Make no … Continue reading →

If you’re using Zipline for portfolio analysis you may be wondering how to get it installed in Google Colab which is running Ubuntu 18.04. Here are the commands.

This week has been an emotional one. We welcomed our new baby, Olivia, to the world on 3/1/22. It’s hard to not be extremely grateful, emotional, and realize how lucky we are when we see what is happening in Ukraine. Babies are being born in bomb shelters and thousands are evacuating Ukraine as I write … Continue reading →

If you ever want to open a Jupyter notebook that you’re reading in Github you can simply replace the URL from github.com to colab.research.google.com/github and the rest of the address. This will open the IPYNB in Colab for easy saving and editing.

If you’re like me and you don’t like having your audiobooks tied up in Audible. There is a way to convert them to MP3. I wrote some Python code in Google Colab to show this process. The first thing you’ll want to do is mount Google drive so you have access to your files. This … Continue reading →

The FED’s decisions affect every asset you own all the way down to the cost of your everyday grocery purchases. I highly recommend Lords of Easy Money by Christoper Leonard. I would also recommend reading and listening to Thomas M. Hoenig’s positions on the FED policy. He served as the President of the Federal Reserve … Continue reading →

I was doing some analysis of the effects of quantitative easing and asset purchases by the FED. Ran across this data of historical ownership of real estate by wealth percentiles.

If you spend a lot of time analyzing big data then data retrieval is paramount. I’ve written some Python code that I use daily to retrieve data from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and finance. The first part of this code simply mounts Google drive so you can interface files on your local computer. … Continue reading →

I’m sitting here doing some completely unrelated research and I stumbled across this figure which I’ve seen multiple times in the past. It has always surprised me. As the markets become extremely volatile this month I wonder, what is the impact on the bottom 50% of Americans? If you look at this chart it barely … Continue reading →

I was recently chatting with a buddy about investing in real estate or stocks and which was better. I decided to use Python to analyze what that investment would look like. I used data from FRED and yfinance which is one of my favorite sources for historical data. Although they do not offer smaller timeframes. … Continue reading →

If you’re getting this error when trying to read a simple .h5 file. Change your code when you originally create the .h5 file to specify format=’table’ This should resolve the issue. This code does not work This code does work

If you’re like me and live east of the US60 there is a good chance you were driving home one random day in November only to be hit with a barrage of rocks and other asphalt materials. The cause of this was neglect by ADOT when they ripped off the asphalt layer of the freeway … Continue reading →

I’m reading this article tonight on the Wall Street Journal where Mark Brvnovich ignorantly tries to bash California in an attempt to somehow boost his own *accomplishments. He uses this NRF organized retail crime survey on two occasions to bash California. He states the following: According to a 2020 survey by the National Retail Federation, three of … Continue reading →

Occasionally there may be some important alerts that you want your trading algorithms to send to you that require immediate attention. One that I use frequently is daily account drawdown. Here’s how you can set up Twilio to send you a text message when your account enters a certain percentage of drawdown. Head over to … Continue reading →

If you’re running your trading algorithms on Linux the best way to get them to start on bootup is to use a service called systemd. Here are the steps on setting that up. Go to: Then create a new service as root: Here is a sample of what the file should look like. You can … Continue reading →

If you’re using Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux you more than likely want your algorithm to start with the server. This is a pretty straightforward process. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure cron is installed Next run crontab -e select nano when it asks which editor. The code below … Continue reading →

If you’re like me you probably have money sitting in your checking, savings, or money-market account. Paying practically zero interest and getting eaten alive by inflation. Here’s what you can do to earn 7.12% on that money and get inflation-adjusted returns on your excess cash. Yield on savings and checking accounts are horrible If you’re … Continue reading →

With inflation running rampant you could actually justify the purchase of a used car as an investment… Crazy when you think about it.

You’re going to want to open Interactive Brokers trader workstation as normal. Then head over to edit>Global Configuration and check that first box. Enable ActiveX and Socket Clients The next thing you’ll want to download is the API’s found here – http://interactivebrokers.github.io/ Next, open the command prompt as an administrator and switch directories where you … Continue reading →

Almost everyone in the United States who owns a home has seen a massive increase in the equity of their house. In the Phoenix metro area, we have seen massive gains. For instance, a house I purchased 1-year ago has seen around a 50% increase in value. Today I was discussing with a friend his … Continue reading →

If you look at the cases of the Delta variant of Covid coming out of the UK it looks alarming and it appears we’re getting ready to get another wave of Covid to shut down the world. But not so fast. Let’s take a look at the hospitalization and the death rate. Hospitalizations are clearly … Continue reading →

I was reading this article today from the Wall Street Journal – Brain Implant Lets Man ‘Speak’ After Being Silent for More Than a Decade(Original article from the New England Journal of Medecine). It begs the question, are we living in a simulation? It may be a good time to watch the movie, The Matrix. … Continue reading →

As we see the surge of meme stocks like or you might be wondering how you can profit and get the jump on the next meme stock to pop. You can actually look at the stock options volume leaders chart. This chart will give you ideas for what stocks are most likely to pop before … Continue reading →

This is an awesome book.

Last year during Covid I decided to purchase some silver options. 4/20/2020 25925191587 Bought SLV Jan 21 2022 15.0 Call @ 3.25 4/20/2020 25925192864 Bought SLV Jan 21 2022 15.0 Call @ 3.25 4/21/2020 25951958123 Bought SLV Jan 21 2022 20.0 Call @ 2.03 5/15/2020 26407463083 Bought SLV Jan 21 2022 30.0 Call @ 1.15 … Continue reading →

You can read about my previous post on this short position here. This stock has returned to its normal volatility and I’m up 17.8% in about two weeks. I’m happy with this trade. I closed my position today at .82 The original premise of the trade was to short this giant undeserved spike in the … Continue reading →

I was discussing principal component analysis and eigenvalues with a friend today. If you’re not familiar with stat arb in the pairs-based trading world this paper is a good read.

I woke up to this text message yesterday. It was completely unsolicited and I have no idea what the source of it is. Could it be a potential pump and dump given the current market circumstances? Maybe… so I decided to dig a little into this company. It looks like it spiked a few years … Continue reading →

Last year I was looking to up my precious metal holdings. I like to keep 10% of my net worth in gold and 1% in silver. I bumped my gold holdings to 20% given the Coronavirus outbreak amongst other reasons outlined below. However, when I went to go and purchase silver from APMEX. I noticed … Continue reading →

I remember back in 2000 during the dot com bubble all of these companies would pay you just to surf the internet using their browser or plugin. We may be in another bubble of some sort but that’s not my purpose of this article. Recently I received a pop up on Facebook for SoFi. A … Continue reading →

Water You always want to make sure your water is at a pH of 5.8. I calibrated my pH meter and then measured my tap and RO water. You can always then measure these two as a baseline to make sure your meter doesn’t need to be recalibrated. Tap water pH: 6.1 / RO water … Continue reading →

I’ve always been fascinated by technology. I love building all types of electronic projects and automating things. Recently I ran across a guy who discussed building a battery backup using recycled scooter batteries that contained 18650 rechargeable batteries. The same ones that you find in Tesla cars and Powerwalls. I started thinking. I wonder if … Continue reading →

A popular strategy that I have followed in my investments is crowdsourcing hedge fund manager investments. Many people don’t know this but any hedge fund that manages over $100 million dollars must report their stock holdings on a form called a 13f. This is filed with the SEC. There is a website that conveniently maps … Continue reading →

At times when creating trading strategies using big data you need access to historical economic data. One of the best sources of data is the Economic Research branch of the St. Louis Federal Reserve or FRED. Today I’m going to show you how to pull that data into a dataframe so that you can analyze … Continue reading →

When analyzing historical time frame data in machine learning it needs to be normalized. In this code example, I will show how to get S&P data then convert it to a percent of daily increase/decrease as well as a logarithmic daily increase/decrease. The first part of this code will use yfinance as our datasource. Next, … Continue reading →

I assume you have insurance for you house, car, and health? Why not insurance to protect you from your government?

A few years ago Facebook decided to open source Prophet. This is their analytics algorithm that uses an additive model to fit non-linear data with seasonality. I started to wonder, “If this algorithm were in place in March when the stock market’s crashed what would it have advised?” So I decided to give it a … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. If you have … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. I had a … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. Attached are zip … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. MT4 has a … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. If you’re working … Continue reading →

I no longer trade using Metatrader. I noticed users kept hitting an invalid link on my website to this search phrase. So the purpose of this post is to catch those invalid links related to Metatrader. I would recommend learning Python and custom developing your algorithms. It will be much more rewarding. I wanted to … Continue reading →