We Love Free Data: Replacing Yahoo Finance Market Data

In keeping with our recent theme of providing useful tidbits of algo trading practicalities, here’s an elegant solution that resolves Yahoo’s unceremonious exit from the free financial data space. Regular readers would know that I use various tools in my algo trading stack, but the one I keep coming back to, particularly when I’m ready …

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How to Run Trading Algorithms on Google Cloud Platform in 6 Easy Steps

Earlier this year, I attended the Google Next conference in San Francisco and gained some first-hand perspective into what’s possible with Google’s cloud infrastructure. Since then, I’ve been leaning on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to run my trading algorithms (and much more) and it has quickly become an important tool in my workflow! In this …

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Solved: Errors Downloading Stock Price Data from Yahoo Finance

Recently, Yahoo Finance – a popular source of free end-of-day price data – made some changes to their server which wreaked a little havoc on anyone relying on it for their algos or simulations. Specifically, Yahoo Finance switched from HTTP to HTTPS and changed the data download URLs. No doubt this is a huge source of frustration, …

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Dual Momentum Investing: A Quant’s Review

I recently read Gary Antonacci’s book Dual Momentum Investing: An Innovative Strategy for Higher Returns with Lower Risk, and it was clear to me that this was an important book to share with the Robot Wealth community. It is important not only because it describes a simple approach to exploiting the “premier anomaly” (Fama and French, …

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Back to Basics Part 3: Backtesting in Algorithmic Trading

  This is the final post in our 3-part Back to Basics series. You may be interested in checking out the other posts in this series: Part 1: An Introduction to Algorithmic Trading Part 2: How to Succeed at Algorithmic Trading We’ve also compiled this series into an eBook which you can download for free …

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Optimal Data Windows for Training a Machine Learning Model for Financial Prediction

It would be great if machine learning were as simple as just feeding data to an out-of-the box implementation of some learning algorithm, then standing back and admiring the predictive utility of the output. As anyone who has dabbled in this area will confirm, it is never that simple. We have features to engineer and …

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Recommended Reading

If there’s one thing I’ve done a lot of over the last few years, reading would be it. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to devouring any material that I thought might give me an edge in my trading – textbooks, academic papers, blog articles, training courses, lecture notes, conference presentations…anything and everything I could get …

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Machine learning for Trading: Part 2

Introduction My first post on using machine learning for financial prediction took an in-depth look at various feature selection methods as a data pre-processing step in the quest to mine financial data for profitable patterns. I looked at various methods to identify predictive features including Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC), Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), algorithms with …

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My experience dealing with Zorro’s support team

Disclaimer: I am not posting this at the behest of the developers of Zorro, nor do I receive any form of payment or commission for this post. I felt that I should relay this experience because it was an example of customer service that went way above and beyond the call of duty in terms of …

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Machine learning for Trading:
Adventures in Feature Selection

Updates: 2019: In this first Machine Learning for Trading post, we’ve added a section on feature selection using the Boruta package, equity curves of a simple trading system, and some Lite-C code that generates the training data.  2020: I’ve updated the original post with some new thinking about data-mining, refreshed the code, updated the data and …

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