Month: June 2011

New banner picture

I changed the banner picture to one I took of my computer screen. It’s some of the programs/data/output from the programs I have written to gather share price data. I finally got round to moving the scrubbing programs onto my rackpsace server. Saves me running computers all day, and rackspace is more reliable . I had problems with my internet connection dropping out etc etc. The basic cloud server isn’t expensive either, about $10 plus traffic a month.

Getting data is crucial to doing any sort of modelling on shares/markets. The way that data is tightly controlled by financial and trading companies is a very good indication of what it is worth. However, I often think that it might not be worth as much as they think. The raw price data alone is not that helpful. I think more information is required if you want to predict future market movements. Its all about the people involved, that it was you need the data on. Markets are unpredictable; large groups of people however, they are very predictable.

ETFS Copper

I sold my Copper ETFS shares today (COPA:LSE). Exchange traded funds are just a vehicle for trading commodities on markets. You don’t buy the commodity itself, rather you buy into a fund which is supposed to buy the commodity. Some say that ETFS are the next derivative bubble. The next collateralized debt obligations (CDO) if you will. I’m not so sure about that, I will give it some thought some other time.

Anyway, I made $480 on the sale. Not at good as I was hoping. I did much better on the rise of crude (ETFS OILD:LSE) after the crisis, I got into copper too late. Commodities have been fairly volatile recently and there are worries and rumours that they are, in general, over priced. So I decided to sell. It means that I have about £700 to invest now and I think my portfolio could do with some more stable stocks. I might think about some food companies. If commodity prices do fall then we might see their margins increase over the next year. Could be a good time to buy…

Making dirs in linux

I sometimes forget how to do stuff so I think I will start writing it down….

Here is how to makes some dirs…

make one dir

mkdir the_dir

make a whole path

mdkir -p ~/the/path/of/dirs/to/make

make a dir with more dirs inside it

mikdir -p a_dir/{inside_dir,inside_dir2}

I will probably remember it all now…

Take three(ish).

I have launched this site a least three times in the past. I never managed to keep up with it. I think its because I lacked time and wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do with it. Well, this time I think I have the idea that will keep my interest. To provide a chronicle of my more adventurous work modelling complex systems. With a focus on financial systems, notably markets. Mainly for my own use as a time line of ideas, but it might prove interesting to other people.