This Week on Twitter

A recap of my twitter account this past week.

US Mint Out Of Silver Coins - Suspends Sales. After only 2 weeks they are out of inventory. Plan resuming in 2 weeks. zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-1…
— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 18, 2013

Great exposition on exactly what the debt ceiling is and more importantly is not.johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2013/01/two-ce…
— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 20, 2013

@timharford dynamism: pirates redistribute based on max profit with less waste using current (not historic) wants & real price disciplines
— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 21, 2013

Possibly Interesting Dodd-Frank book? Authors claim law lays the groundwork for next big financial crisis. amazon.com/dp/B00AWSF384/…
— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 21, 2013

Bernanke circa '07: "We are not in the business of bailing out individuals or businesses." on.wsj.com/SeLQt5
— Nin-Hai Tseng (@ninhaitseng) January 18, 2013

Bitcoin-funded online casino turned a $572,000 profit after six months of operation bit.ly/UUyFw9
— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 23, 2013

A Favorite Resource: R-Bloggers

I have programmed professionally in several languages over the course of my career. These include: Vision, C++, visual basic, S-plus, SAS, perl, various scripting languages, and certain proprietary languages. But when I am at home, my default language is typically R.

I enjoy using R in my personal projects primarily for three semi-interrelated reasons. First the similarity between R and S-plus makes R easy to learn and comfortable to use. Second of course is R's unbelievably low price. And third, because of the first two reasons, there is a large and robust community of support. There are a tremendous number of modules, plugins and examples available on the web for such things as time-series analysis, advanced statistics, and good object-oriented design techniques.

This Week on Twitter

One of the new changes around here will be a weekly update or summary of my activity on twitter. Since this is the initial post of this series, I am actually going to include the past two weeks here. While one could alway venture to my twitter page, or follow me directly on twitter to see some of my current thoughts, I think having them incorporated into the blog will prove beneficial. It will create one centralized place where a reader can learn more about me. After all, centralizing and conveying my ideas is a main purpose of this blog.

Why Workers Are Losing the War Against Machines zite.to/ViwtgL via @zite

— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) December 30, 2012

Bernanke winning as we all pile into more risk: Margin Debt Soars To 2008 Levels As Everyone Is "All In", zite.to/12P0UAP

— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) December 30, 2012

#Copernicus correctly understood that debasement of money was a main reason for the fall of a state bit.ly/S7TQNS. Same today in U.S.

— Jim Rickards (@JamesGRickards) January 4, 2013

New edition of 1984 will feature a "censored" blacked out cover bit.ly/UNMWeL

— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 7, 2013

bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-1…interesting article on the Quants Marxist roots

— Robert Petry, CFA (@rpetry) January 16, 2013

Reboot!

With a new year I think it is a good time to try to revive this blog. A lot of changes in my personal life combined with new challenges provided by the Dodd-Frank legislation and an overdose of perfectionism conspired to thwart some of my blogging efforts over the past year.  But with a revived commitment and some new ideas, I think the changes I have in store for this site will be positive. Stay tuned for version 2.0 of the blog.

Deeper Into the Black Box?

Stanford University is offering their class Computer Science 221: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence online this fall. They are also making the class open to anyone and the best part is: it is all totally free. (Although there is an optional text book to buy.) The class will be team taught by Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun and Google's Peter Norvig, two leaders in the field. I am excited for this class both for its content and also for what this kind of format portends for the future of global education.

Importance

A good friend and workout buddy of mine, Olin, has in the past year become a huge evangelist for A.I. He has an excellent post on his corporate blog about why everyone needs to take this class. And I agree.  It used to be that only a small group used computers to manage funds, now nearly every successful investor incorporates some level of quant screening into either the alpha or risk process. As those screen become more sophisticated, no doubt some level of A.I. will sneak in.  Olin also makes an interesting observation about re-educating programmers to teach the computer. It reminds of my early days in the industry as a consultant working objects before they were ubiquitous. (I would argue that that they are still rarely used to their full potential.) I would spend a lot of time teaching quants to think less in a process-driven way and to program more naturally. Trust the computer handle lower-level tasks like iteration. Focus instead on tying solid economic theories to investment outcomes.