My Trading (Solar) System

After reading accounts that our moon is shrinking, my thoughts turned to our solar system and I began to ponder its design and configuration. That means it's just a matter of time before I coerce it into a metaphor for trading. As is my style, I often take on more subject matter than is necessary and even practical. What does svn have to do with trading again? Oh yeah, it's a file management system that keeps track of programming scripts I wrote to extract data that will be fed into a model that will predict the market. Well, back to my metaphor. My trading solar system includes several "planets", each part of the whole, but each with its own atmosphere and unique characteristics.

Let's start with Mercury. I've assigned the topics of Ubuntu, svn, vim, gcc and bash to this orbital. I'm thinking a progression here, so we start with the basics before we get "way out there". Next is Venus and its inhabitants are compiled languages that include C, C#, C++ and maybe Java at some other time. This planet shines brightest in the night sky and is often mistaken for a UFO, which to me is appropriate. Of course, Earth is next in line, but nothing in trading is really worth the title of "home", so this is a reserved spot for my non-trading life.

Mars is the "red planet". Red starts with an "r", and so Mars is for R. And maybe some other functional languages in the future including Python, Perl and Ruby. In any case, R is the first place where trading takes on a significant demographic. Saturn is for data mining and harvesting. Data is an important topic in trading and deserves its own planet. Fundamental traders use data, as do technicians. And certainly model builders, because you must feed data to a model to have it produce a prediction, you see. Saturn's rings remind me of data in a way I cannot explain. Let's just leave it there.

Jupiter is the big boy in our system, and is the realm of models. Neural networks and statistical models reside here and are in a perpetual dispute over who is heir to the kingdom of Prediction. They are quarreling brothers, really. Same DNA, but different temperments and demeanors. The older Statistical Modeling has an edge over his younger brother Neural Networks, but the drama is still unfolding.

Do you remember the movie "E.T." and the line about "your extra-terrestrial is from ... blank"? Well, let's try to forget that for now and think about nuclear explosive devices instead. Uranus is like uranium. It powers our electrical grid and is the realm of trading systems, those elusive little devils that say "Go Long" or "Go Short" or some such thing. They are devoid of emotion because they are made nuclear fissionable material. Remember that you, my fellow space traveler, are not.

I've reserved the planet Neptune to a future deployment of leasable trading algorithms. And Pluto, which is "way out there" and not even really a planet per se, is reserved for my managed-futures fund.

This metaphor is handy in that it provides me with situational awareness. Where am I now and where am I going? Well, these questions are easier to answer now. Today, I'm going to Mars to check out how R handles environment path variables. On my near-term itinerary I have plans to revisit Mercury to better acquaint myself with svn, and then I'm planning a "working" vacation on Venus as I launch into my C# education. I'm excited about Winter break because I've got a couple weeks on Jupiter to spend on Bayesian statistics and Long Short-Term Memory (or LSTM as the locals call it). 

Next time I get that quizzical look and question about "Milk, where are you going with this?", I'll be able to respond. I'm on a little space traveling journey, of course.