Portfolio Performance for November 2008
Posted by Mike Taylor | Sunday, December 14, 2008
Performance charts for November...better late than never:
As you can see, more of the same. Market is down...TaylorTree not so much. The simple strategy of scaling out of the market as the market moves further down reduces our downside volatility at the expense of upside returns. No timing going on here at all. Just positions being sold due to stop losses and a lack of new signals to use up that cash.
By the way, I have updated the looks of the site. It is still a work in progress...but hopefully an improvement. I especially like the Recent Bookmarks and research via TaylorTree sections. Automates the "What I'm Researching" posts.
Later Trades,
MT
Labels: portfolio
What I'm Researching...
Posted by Mike Taylor | Wednesday, November 26, 2008
| CodeProject: Optimizing a Function of One Variable. Posted: 26 Nov 2008 12:31 AM CST find the minimum or maximum over an interval. nice. |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2008 12:27 AM CST contains manual and faq. this tool allows dynamic reporting via sweave & R language. can generate latex docs which can gen to pdf or even html via R's R2HTML function. |
| Posted: 26 Nov 2008 12:24 AM CST interesting open source latex editor to check out. |
| Sweave: First steps toward reproducible analyses Posted: 26 Nov 2008 12:23 AM CST embed R code via sweave to generate latex document containing results. awesome! must use this for my next presentation paper. |
| Moving data between R, Excel, and the Windows clipboard Posted: 26 Nov 2008 12:19 AM CST nice summary of writeClipboard, readClipboard, and scan, read.table, and write.table functions. |
| How to write parallel programs (pdf) Posted: 25 Nov 2008 12:06 AM CST Nice intro to parallel programming. Need to spend more time with this paper. |
| R/S-PLUS Fundamentals and Programming Techniques (pdf) Posted: 24 Nov 2008 11:58 PM CST nice coverage of programming in R language. From reading data, plotting data, managing code, logging analysis, and bootstrapping. |
Labels: research
What I'm Researching...
Posted by Mike Taylor | Friday, November 14, 2008
| Posted: 13 Nov 2008 01:00 PM CST great summaries on the classic rexx functions. |
| Posted: 13 Nov 2008 12:53 PM CST Joel on Software's Real World. A must see! |
| Reading List: Fog Creek Software Management Training Program - Joel on Software Posted: 13 Nov 2008 12:50 PM CST great reading list! |
In Python how do I sort a list of dictionaries by values of the dictionary? - Stack Overflow
Posted: 09 Nov 2008 09:29 PM CST
| AT&T Labs Research - Yoix / YWAIT Posted: 07 Nov 2008 07:36 AM CST Interesting way to build a web application. Wonder how complex this would be to use versus traditional web-based systems (LAMP)? This may be easier to deploy if the goal of the software is simulation/visualizations. Something to toy with. |
| AT&T Labs Research - Yoix / Byzgraf Posted: 07 Nov 2008 07:33 AM CST Another great looking toolset using Yoix that enables plotting functions: line, bar, histograms, etc. |
| AT&T Labs Research - Yoix / YDAT Posted: 07 Nov 2008 07:32 AM CST Extremely cool visualization toolset from AT&T Labs Research. Handles graphviz files. |
Labels: graphviz, programming, python, rexx
Portfolio Performance for October 2008
Posted by Mike Taylor | Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Drawdown city. Stay in this game long enough and you'll encounter months like September/October. In fact, they happen so infrequently...it's almost like recalling a memorable storm from years back. I still remember the panic my mom went into whenever there was a hurricane in the Gulf. She'd stock up on food, plot the hurricane on those maps the National Hurricane Center would give out, and fret, fret, fret. 99% of those hurricanes would peter out, stall, or miss us entirely. But, she still remembered living through the devastation of Hurricane Carla...and felt the fear every summer 30+ years later.The human mind is a funny, funny thing...behaving binary with pain. If you've never experienced the pain of a hurricane, snowstorm, loss of a loved one, or the falling knife of the market...you're set to 0. You operate without fear. But, once you experience the pain...you're set to 1. And everything you do from that point forward is now based off that pain. Based off that switch.
And that switch is a bugger to reset. Most people can't do it. The instant the pain hits they begin tweaking their life as if the odds of experiencing that pain again has increased to a 100% certainty. Funny part is...
- the odds of experiencing the pain hasn't increased
- all those tweaks won't do a damn thing to prevent future pain.
What's my point? Invest in the market knowing the worst will happen. The foundation of your investment strategy should be able to withstand the storm. If you're busy tweaking your strategy right now in an attempt to avoid the next storm, trying to pick and choose your investment spots, thinking all the work you're doing will sidestep the next storm because you figured out how to handle this storm...then your bit is set to 1. And this cowboy quote likely fits:
Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.And with that the performance charts for the month of October 2008.
We're experiencing a fairly hefty drawdown as is the market. I've received several exit signals over the past 2 months. At one of the highest level of cash since investing in the market. And doing nothing but patiently waiting out the storm.
That, and preparing for a cold Missouri winter.
Later Trades,
MT
What I'm Researching...
Posted by Mike Taylor | Friday, November 07, 2008
| Overview of RAMFS and TMPFS on Linux Posted: 06 Nov 2008 11:02 PM CST Map your memory as a drive? Wonder how this would work if you built a linux server with 32gb memory and mapped at least half that dedicated for simulations? How much faster would this be versus traditional disk-based sims? |
| Replacing multiple occurrences in nested arrays - Stack Overflow Posted: 06 Nov 2008 10:58 PM CST will this work in updating a dictionary of prices? if you have a dictionary of portfolio positions with values being python lists...would this be a good solution in updating the closing price of the stock (one of the items in the list)? |
Labels: hardware, linux, python
What I'm Researching...
Posted by Mike Taylor | Friday, October 31, 2008
| Producing Open Source Software Posted: 30 Oct 2008 09:56 PM CDT very cool online book detailing the starting of an open source project. |
| OmniTI ~ Careers ~ Site Reliability Engineer Posted: 28 Oct 2008 12:04 PM CDT one of the best job descriptions I've read on working as an operations engineer. best two quotes: "If you don't grow, you'll fail." & "Think of it like any other fun and challenging job you've had -- now remove the margin for error." How true! |
What I'm Researching...
Posted by Mike Taylor | Monday, October 27, 2008
| Posted: 26 Oct 2008 02:28 PM CDT pre-installed linux provider |
| Posted: 26 Oct 2008 02:26 PM CDT pre-installed linux computers (laptops, desktops, servers). |
| Posted: 26 Oct 2008 11:18 AM CDT date, time, calendar manipulations in R. Sample functions are diffTimeDate, isWeekday, isWeekend, and the very cool timeNdayOnOrAfter, timeNthNdayInMonth, timeLastNdayInMonth. |
| How To... Mount Your Computer Screen Posted: 26 Oct 2008 10:17 AM CDT details how to wall mount your monitor. very cool. |
Javascript style dot notation for dictionary keys unpythonic? - Stack Overflow
Posted: 23 Oct 2008 06:59 AM CDT
| Posted: 22 Oct 2008 12:38 PM CDT really cool flex library to display graphviz graphs. haven't explored the flex toolset before...but may have to check it out. |
| z/OS Workload Manager - How it works & How to use it (pdf) Posted: 21 Oct 2008 12:18 AM CDT Great summary on Workload Manager (WLM)...including tips for setup and troubleshooting existing setups. |
Labels: graphviz, linux, R, z/OS
