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 pH: 6.6

1.16.21-Tap water pH: 7.3 / RO water pH: 8.2

Here is a list of things you will need to calibrate your water.

2021.1.3 2100

First step is to simply drop your seeds into RO water. I would recommend a max of 5 per cup for 15 hours.

2 green crack seeds in RO water. 4 Jack Herer in RO water.

2021.1.4 1300

Seeds have been soaking for 16 hours moving to napkin in Ziplock, black bag, and box. Placed on Ether Miner for heat.

2021.1.5

Checked the seeds no growth yet.

2021.1.6

Two green crack seeds have sprouted so I’m going to move these to root riot plugs.

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The four Jack Herer seeds have not yet sprouted so I’m going to stick them back in a ziplock covered in a paper towel, black bag, and box.

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2021.1.7

Jack Herer seeds still don’t seem to be germinating that quick. I’m going to leave them another day.

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Also no sprouting in the humidity dome from the Green Crack plants.

One of the Green Crack plants popped through in the pm.

2021.1.8

So I probably let this Green Crack plant go for too long in the dark. I’m going to move it into the grow tent where it can get a ton of blue spectrum light. This will promote bushy growth vs. the red spectrum which will cause growth in length and is better for flowering.

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I’m going to move all the Jack Herer seeds to the humidity dome with the exception of one which doesn’t appear to have popped open. One of them appears to have broke when I moved it. I feel like I may have left my paper towel too wet.

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Here is the placement of the seeds in the humidity dome.

Humidity

You’re going to want a humid environment for your plants. I would recommend something like this.

2021.1.9

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Lights

Any of these smaller lights will work for the seedling phase.

Powerful LED’s

You are eventually going to need something more powerful. This is what I use.

2021.1.10

Looks like all of the seedlings popped except one. Haven’t added any water since the original move from the plastic bag. Also the last Jack Herer seed is refusing to germinate. I left it in the bag but typically when it takes this long they’re duds.

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2021.1.11

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2021.1.12

Pretty sure that bottom left Jack Herer is shot. Plus the last seed doesn’t appear to be germinating.

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2021.1.14

Looks like roots are starting to appear. I’ll probably move these to a hydroponic setup soon.

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First nutrients

Now that these seedlings are getting a little older I’m going to add some Clonex nutrients. I’m going to mix up 1 gallon of water and 18mL of Clonex.

1.21.2021

So I definitely got lazy and waited too long to move these into my hydroponic box in my window seal. You can see some of the leaves are in bad shape.

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I’m going to put these in my south facing window seal for light. I’m going to supplement it with a florescent light 18 hours on and 6 hours off.

Water and Nutrients

Here is my template for maintaing the hydroponic system. This one is just a single 5 gallon bucket that pumps the water onto the roots and it drains back down.

The main nutrients I use are made by General Hydroponics.

I also use a few additives in addition to these.

h2o2 also known as hydrogen peroxide. In hydroponic setups you’re apt to get some type of root rot or infection. I use h2o2 as a preventative along with Armor Si made by General Hydroponics.

You’ll want to use RO water with your setup. This way your water is pure. With that being said it’s important to add calcium and magnesium back into the water.

Flushing your water

Every 7-14 days you’ll want to completely drain and flush your water. What I’ll typically do is drain all the water. Replace it with tap water and this FloraKleen product. Let this run for 2-4 hours and then completely drain it.

1.27.2021

I haven’t done anything to the plants. I just let them grow with 18 hours of LED light and then the natural sunlight through the window.

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1.29.2021

I wanted to post an update of what the roots look like at this point.

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I also lost one of the plants and only had 4 growing. So I decided to germinate two more today. A Harlequin and a Blueberry plant. I tried twice to get a Harlequin to germinate and failed both times. So I’m just going to move this Blueberry over to the window seal hydroponic setup.

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2.1.2021

The Blueberry is looking healthy after a few days.

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2.11.2021

So I neglected these plants again. I haven’t added any nutrients since the initial move on 1.23.2021. It gives you an idea of how maintenance-free this setup is. You can also see a large amount of growth in a relatively short timeframe. The roots grew way too big to pull through the plastic containers so I lost a good portion of them while transplanting tonight. It will be interesting to see how they respond. You can see how they’re in their final spot which is the 5-gallon bucket until they flower and harvest. I had to leave two of them in the window seal due to a lack of room in the tent. Their roots are going to get way too big for this setup. I may let them flower early or move them to a dirt container.

Notice the Blueberry is the smallest one and is about 10 days old.

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Tent

The plants are now in this tent.

Lighting

The LED light I’m using is this.

Exhaust Fan

You’ll also want a fan to keep the airflow and vent the plants. I use this one.

Timer

I use these timers to control the lights.

Humidity

You’ll also need a humidifier to keep your air humid.

The method I use are 5-gallon buckets in which one bucket is the control bucket. It’s empty and they all drain back into it. Then the water gets re-circulated using a pump to spray the roots.

2.25.2021

Here are the plants in their final home. In Arizona, you can grow up to 12 plants per household so long as there are two adults in the household.

3.5.2021

Updated status.

3.12.2021

Updated status.

3.17.2021

Lighting Schedule change

Today I’m switching the lights to be on 12 hours and off 12 hours. What this does is it signals to the plant it’s time to flower, or create buds. This will be the final phase of my grow in about 6-8 weeks the bud will be ready to harvest.

3.22.2021

I wanted to show what a male plant looks like. I had to take this one out of the grow tent. You don’t want males as they will pollinate the females and ruin the crop.

You can see how big this plant has gotten and it has developed quite a rooting system!

4.1.2021

4.13.21

Buds are starting to come to life. Just a few more weeks left of flowering.

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 it would be possible to trickle charge a battery during low-cost energy hours (6PM-3PM) and then dump it back into the grid when the electricity was expensive(3PM-6PM). Or at least offset your peak hour usage with battery power. So I created some formulas and crunched some numbers. Before you read any further I want to say this is a complete hypothetical experiment. I would never connect this to my SRP system and risk them terminating my services.

Here is a list of SRP’s different electricity rates. You can see the greatest offset is in the months of May, June, July, August, September, and October. The variance in winter is not that great and you really can’t save that much using this method.

Ok, let’s compile a spreadsheet using these formulas.

ROI

Analyzing the ROI this setup using a simple 3kWh battery and a 1kW inverter we can yield 18.27% with a completely paid for system in 5.47 years. Not a bad return for someone with a little bit of money to invest.

Parts

So I started buying parts.

6 – Scooter batteries

1 – Inverter

1 – Charge/Discharge monitor

1 – Smart switch

1 – Battery Charger

1 – AC auto transfer switch

1 – Distribution block

1 – Arduino Nano

1 – Buck converter

Part 2

I’ll be assembling and testing over the next week. To be continued…

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 all of these filings so you can scan through your favorite investment manager and see what stocks they are buying and selling.

For instance, if you’re a fan of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger you can take a look at Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings – https://whalewisdom.com/filer/berkshire-hathaway-inc Here is a list of their holdings which are over 1% of their portfolio

Or may be you’re a fan of Ray Dalio and you want to see what Bridgewater is holding? Here is a list of all their holdings that represent more than 1% of their portfolio.

Let’s take a look at Jim Simon’s fund Renaissance Technologies.

You get the point. You are able to get some pretty good insight as to what massive hedge funds are buying.

WhaleIndex

What I like about Whale Wisdom is they categorize the most successful hedge fund managers using what they refer to as a WhaleIndex.They then put together a list of 30 stocks based on successful fund managers. Some of their requirements are as follows.

• Between 5 and 750 holdings in their 13F filing
• At least 3 consecutive years of quarterly 13F filings
• Hold no fewer than five stocks in its portfolio
• Manage more than $100 million in marketable securities
• Hold at least 20% of its portfolio in its top 20 stocks
• Managers considered to be a bank, trust, pension, or insurance company are excluded

The top 40 managers who have maintained an average WhaleScore over the past 5-years higher than the five-year average WhaleScore of the S&P 500 is used in the WhaleIndex. Based on the holdings disclosed on their SEC filings, WhaleWisdom identifies the 100 stocks most commonly held among the respective managers’ 13F holdings.

The Whale Fund 2.0 is the one I follow. Since 2006 this strategy has yielded 1,345% – https://whalewisdom.com/whaleindex/portfolio_2_0

A few words of caution

13f filings come out 45 days after the quarter ends. This means the data is somewhat stale. It should also be noted that the fund could have purchased that stock at any time during the quarter. Meaning the data could be as old as 135 days. Secondly, funds are not required to report short positions or hedged positions. So you should not assume you know exactly what their portfolio consists of.

Broker

You’ll want to find a broker that allows for fractional investing if you don’t have enough money to buy full shares. Here are a couple for reference.

Firstrade – 4 free stocks with $100 deposit

Robinhood – Sign up link your bank account and get a free stock.

In Conclusion

Despite its downfalls, Whale Wisdom’s returns are still solid. While I wouldn’t recommend this strategy for your entire portfolio this is a good strategy to deploy a fixed percentage of your portfolio. There is also a book that written about this concept which you can find here – https://www.amazon.com/Invest-With-The-House-Hacking-ebook/dp/B01A3L1VEO and also an ETF that was created named VIP ETF

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 it using machine learning or AI.

The first step is to import Pandas datareader. What this piece of code does is it downloads all the data for Corporate AAA bond yields. Every dataset in FRED has a symobl. In this case it’s DAAA.

import pandas_datareader.data as web
import datetime

today = pd.to_datetime("today")
start = datetime.datetime(1900, 1, 1)
end = today

df_Corp_AAA_yield = web.DataReader(['DAAA'], 'fred', start, end)

# not working - Corp_AAA_yield = web.DataReader(['DAAA'], 'fred', start, end)
df_Corp_AAA_yield.head()
df_Corp_AAA_yield.tail()

We can now visualize our dataframe by plotting it.

df_Corp_AAA_yield.plot(grid=True)