Publications by klr

Cubism Horizon Charts in R

15.06.2012

Like many, I have been in awe of the d3.js and cubism.js visualization packages created by Mike Bostock. Mike Bostock @ Square talks about Time Series Visualization from Librato on Vimeo. The charts are beautiful and extraordinarily functional, so I thought it would be fun to at least replicate the horizon chart (unfortunately without the helpful...

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Where are the Fat Tails?

19.06.2012

In Crazy RUT, I started to explore why the moving average strategy has failed for the last 2 decades on the Russell 2000.  I still do not have an answer, but I thought looking at skewness and kurtosis might help explain some of the challenge of beating this index.  I think–but don’t have as much rigid objective evidence as I would like–th...

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Crazy RUT in Academic Context Why Trend is Not Your Friend

26.06.2012

In response to Where are the Fat Tails?, reader vonjd very helpfully referred me to this paper The Trend is Not Your Friend! Why Empirical Timing Success is Determined by the Underlying’s Price Characteristics and Market Efficiency is Irrelevant by Peter Scholz and Ursula Walther.  The authors conclude “Our study on the basis of real data c...

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Horizon Plot Already Available

29.06.2012

When I wrote Cubism Horizon Charts in R, I should have known that horizon plot functionality already exists in R http://rgm2.lab.nig.ac.jp/RGM2/func.php?rd_id=latticeExtra:horizonplot and in this case in one of my already favorite packages latticeExtra. I think I like my version a little better, but I’m sure the horizonplot function from lattic...

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Graphics Artifacts from Quarterly Commentary

02.07.2012

For my Q2 2012 commentary, I tried multiple graphs to illustrate the disconnect of the US stock markets with the rest of the world.  I think I finally settled on this simple Excel bar graph populated by Bloomberg data, but I thought some might like to see some of the R graphical artifacts as I explored how best to illustrate my point. From ...

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More Exploration of Crazy RUT

05.07.2012

Unintentionally while playing with the lawstat package in R, I started trying to build systems (STANDARD DISCLAIMER: NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE AND WILL LOSE LOTS OF MONEY SO PROCEED WITH CAUTION) based on the Jarque Bera test of normality (entry in Wikipedia or the research paper http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=18293285759900281575&hl=en&as...

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Best of Axys, R, d3.js, and HTML5

19.07.2012

Axys, R, d3.js, and HTML5 all offer incredibly powerful tools for investment management and reporting, but they are not set up to synergistically interact to fill each other’s gaps and leverage each other’s strengths.  In my ideal scenario, Axys serves as the accounting system and performance calculator, R serves as the advanced financial/st...

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The Failure of Asset Allocation – Bonds Are An Imperfect Hedge

24.07.2012

US investors were spoiled by US Treasuries which acted as a near perfect hedge to stocks during the 2008-2009 crisis.  However, in real crisis, bonds rarely offer any comfort, and asset allocation fails (see post Death Spiral of a Country and IMF paper Systemic Banking Crises Database: An Update; by Luc Laeven … – IMF).  As a very timely ex...

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Inspirational Stack Overflow Dendrogram Applied to Currencies

25.07.2012

When I saw the answer to this Stack Overflow question, I immediately remembered working on my old post Clustering with Currencies and Fidelity Funds and just had to try to apply this technique.  As I should have guessed, it worked with only a minimal amount of changes.  Hoping to incrementally improve, I added a couple of slight modifications. ...

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Hi R and Axys, I’m d3.js “Nice to Meet You” (On the Iphone)

27.07.2012

I am still definitely in the proof of concept stage, but as I progress I get more excited about the prospects of combining d3.js with R and Axys through Bryan Lewis’ really nice R websockets package (even nicer now that he has added the daemonize function).  In this iteration, I will add a cumulative growth line chart, some animation and trans...

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