A guest post by Mirsad Hasic.

Trading by the raw price change in the volatile market is indeed the best of the Forex strategies.  Those Forex systems and strategies used by major financial institutions might not work for day traders and vice versa.

A single mechanical trading strategy will probably not work for a long time.  The differences in volumes traded and the volatility of the price of the currency pairs make it impossible to have a standardized Forex trading strategy.  The strategy should be flexible and differed by demand of trends.

There is always a right time to buy or sell a currency pair; however, the exact time to buy or sell is relative to personal trading needs.  When one feels it is the best time to sell a currency, you might feel it is the appropriate time for you to buy it. There is no best time to buy a currency. It is relative and differs between investor attitudes. The decisions on whether to go long or short on a position relates to the risk appetite of the buyer and his forecast of the near future.

This is a news tip that might be of interest sent by Anthony Goldbloom, thanks.

In the lead-up to the world cup, Kaggle invited statisticians and data miners to take on the big investment banks in predicting the outcome of the World Cup. Now that the final has been decided, we can take a look at how Kagglers stacked up against the quants at JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS and Danske Bank in forecasting the World Cup.

In total, 65 teams participated in the Take on the Quants challenge. JP Morgan finished 28th, Goldman Sachs 33rd, UBS 55th and Danske Bank 64th. The betting markets fared better, finishing 16th.

The winner of the competition was Thomas Mahony, an Australian economist. His approach relied on Elo ratings with an adjustment for home country/continent advantage. His strategy correctly tipped Spain to win, the Netherlands to finish second and Germany to finish in the top four. The investment banks all had their top picks bow out early (UBS, Goldman Sachs and Danske Bank picked Brazil and JP Morgan picked England), hurting their overall performance.

The next big question is whether Kagglers can also outperform the quants in forecasting financial markets (we won’t have to wait long to find out, as Kaggle is currently hosting a competition to predict stock price movements).

Ros is a colleague of mine in the same office, his main research is empirical analysis of different option pricing models, and as a result, he often use several computers on different desks to run his matlab codes, which is time-consuming and not rare to last 2 or 3 days. So he has to come back office frequently to check which computer has finished the task. It sounds boring, why not write a small script to send SMS message to you automatically when your matlab stops running?

Send Text Message to Cell Phone is such a great file I found recently, bascially what it does is to send email via sendmail function of Matlab from your gmail box to your cell phone carrier, and then your cell phone carrier forwards the email to you as a text message.

Problem
However, it works for US based cell phones only, I have tried on my UK T-mobile phone and it seems UK T-mobile doesn't support such a mail to SMS service (correct me if I am wrong).

Solution
Fortunately, I came across SMS service website which allows people to send up to 3 free email to SMS per day, it should be enough for our use in Matlab. Add the following line in the switch case after line 55

that's it, the email will be delivered as an SMS to your mobile. Do let me know if you are aware of a better alternative.

So what you need to do is to put the function send_text_message at the end of your file, it will then send you a message automatically, for example

What else can it be used? stock price alert? profit threshold alarm? you name it.

I have been looking for this type of package for several days, and luckily found it today. Unquestionable R is powerful, however, R programming is unfriendly as far as I concern, mainly due to the lack of format shortcut, which makes the R codes rather ugly. (It is an absolute advantage of Matlab, for example, ctrl+R for comment, ctrl+T for uncomment, ctrl+I for smart indent, etc.)

FormatR is the package for tidying R source code, although it is less convenient to use than the straightforward shortcuts in Matlab, this package is good enough for me, what is it for? as the title suggest:

Below is a comparison before and after using FormatR.
Before:


After:


Download the package at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/formatR/index.html

Imagine you finish a dirty coding project and want to present to your boss who is not in a good mood (may not be occasionally), how are you going to start? Show him your hundreads of lines code, point to the lines, explain what the arguments and outputs are? No, it is not a smart way since you are supposed to introduce in a few short sentences. Generating a GUI is probably the quickest / easiest way of understanding what this code does. As the old saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words, so in a same logic, a GUI is worth n thousand words.

However, generating GUI is by no means easy as I know the pain when creating the Matlab-GUI equity derivative calculator. It becomes even worse in R language, to be honest, I hate the graph plotting in R, terribly unflexible compared with in Matlab. Luckily I came across a good R GUI package named "fgui", it does as its description: Rapidly create a GUI interface for a function you created by automatically creating widgets for arguments of the function.

Very nice indeed, after playing for half an hour, it is simple to use, especially when what you need is just a basic GUI demonstrating to others a rough idea. One line code is enough.