Tim Bovee, Private Trader: Prospects list status

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Prospects list status

My analytical engine crashed earlier in the week and to solve the problem, I'm making changes, including reconfiguration of the database and alterations to associated code. (See my initial explainer here.)

The crashes and slowdowns have been caused by the growing size of the data set relative to the resources available for the work done upon it. This is a perennial trade-off faced by all private traders. The first rule of the game might well be "Stick to your trading plan", but surely the second one is, "Hold down the overhead."

The solutions are better indexing of the data and use of a time-limited dataset for the daily analyses. My data goes back to 2007. The analyses I do rarely go back more than a year. A time-limited dataset for operations, perhaps going back only to 2013, will cause no problems, and I shall retain the full dataset for longer-term studies.

~~It appears likely that the coding work won't be completed until the weekend, making it impossible to produce prospects lists on Thursday or Friday of this week.~~

Pessimism can be such a good motivator. I finished debugging the code this morning, Feb. 12, and as a result, the processing is 10 times faster. In other words, a seven-hour overnight processing marathon has shrunk to a 40-minute chore. I'm fairly happy with that outcome.

I'm running the analytics on a low-power Utilite computer by the Israeli company CompuLab. The operating system is Ubuntu Linux. The database management system is SQLite. I've written the associated software in the Perl language.

-- Tim Bovee, Portland, Oregon, Feb. 11, 2015

References

My shorter-term trading rules can be read here. My longer-term trading rules can be read here. And the classic Turtle Trading rules on which my rules are based can be read here. My volatility trading rules can be read here.

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Disclaimer

Tim Bovee, Private Trader tracks the analysis and trades of a private trader for his own accounts. Nothing in this blog constitutes a recommendation to buy or sell stocks, options or any other financial instrument. The only purpose of this blog is to provide education and entertainment.

No trader is ever 100 percent successful in his or her trades. Trading in the stock and option markets is risky and uncertain. Each trader must make trading decisions for his or her own account, and take responsibility for the consequences.