1-6. Data Processing

Think about all the sources of information we have considered so far, market data, corporate actions, fundamental information, compositional data. This is the standard information that everyone uses, it’s small compared to the amount of data that can affect the market. There is useful information all around you to help you predict the market, information … Read more

Let’s take a moment to think about what a trading algorithms goal should be. The obvious part is making money i.e, we should try to generate as much positive returns from trading as possible but the stock market is inherently very unpredictable as we have already seen. One approach is to buy stocks that have … Read more

The average return from experiment A is indeed higher than from B. Why is that? It’s due to a phenomenon known as survivor bias or survivorship bias. If you only picked from the stocks that have survived until today, that already filtered out all the other stocks that failed during that period. Another way to … Read more

Up until now, you’ve been treating stock prices as a continuous time series. For instance, the end of day data for stock includes a row for every day or does it? Here’s how Facebook traded over the month of May in 2017. As you can see, there’s these clumps of five samples and then a … Read more

So, you have your stock prices adjusted for corporate actions like splits and dividends. How do you use this information to perform trading? When you buy, when you sell, or even which stocks do you buy or sell. You can take these decisions based on signals that can be derived from historical price data. The … Read more

The next corporate action we’ll talk about is dividend, specifically cash dividends. Dividends are when companies share some fraction of their profits with their shareholders. Let’s take a look at Qualcomm which pays out dividends pretty much every quarter. On May, 21st of 2017, they paid out $0.57 per share. However, dividends are given to … Read more

The next set of data we’ll talk about is related to events a company can take that affects its shareholders. This data is called Corporate Actions. For this lesson, we’ll describe only two of the many corporate actions. Stock splits and dividends. Let’s start with stock splits. On June 2nd, 1998, you could buy a … Read more

Let’s start with market data. This is any data that you receive from the market typically generated from trades. This is perhaps the most important form of data relevant to quantitative analysis. Market data is temporal in nature, it’s a series of trading events that happen in a moment of time, each moment is called … Read more

Albert Einstein reportedly said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” Your drive to stick with things and see them through in a large part will determine your success, not just with this Nanodegree program, but in your job, and in your life. Our goal at Udacity is … Read more

Let’s use the knowledge you took from Marketplace Mechanics, and dive deep into the data. The data is the most important thing to quantitative analysis. Without good data, you don’t have good predictions. That is sometimes referred to as the garbage in, garbage out principle. That is the quality of your data directly impacts the … Read more