I've tried playing with the stock market. As a "busy person" it's very difficult for me to keep up with what's going on in the world. The result: I lose. I lose money, then I lose time trying to figure out how to not lose money, then I lose more time investigating dead-end stocks and funds, then I lose more time and money drinking and babbling about how many times I was almost rich and how hard it was growing up as a poor black boy in the South.
Finally, a few months ago, it dawned on me that I'm good at making computers do all my work for me. I can spend hours getting the computer to do a 10 minute job for me, just so I don't have to do it. So I decided to do a little experiment to see if I could get a computer to make worthy financial suggestions.
Thus was birthed ABuddy.
I slammed together version 1 as a proof of concept in an afternoon. All it did was scrape quotes from Yahoo! pages, plunk them in a table and color code them if they dropped or rose by 5% or more. I had it choose which symbols to look at by giving it a list of industries and having it pull the ones with the biggest market caps.
It was a complete shot in the dark, but for a first pass it did surprisingly well at narrowing down things for me to investigate.
I've now run 3 "test cycles" with this system in which I invested around $10k (of imaginary money) and tracked my success. I learned a few things, and watched which patterns worked and which didn't.
With those lessons under my belt, I've now started working on version 2.
"You mean I'm gonna stay this color?!"
-Steve Martin, The Jerk
-Steve Martin, The Jerk
Finally, a few months ago, it dawned on me that I'm good at making computers do all my work for me. I can spend hours getting the computer to do a 10 minute job for me, just so I don't have to do it. So I decided to do a little experiment to see if I could get a computer to make worthy financial suggestions.
Thus was birthed ABuddy.
I slammed together version 1 as a proof of concept in an afternoon. All it did was scrape quotes from Yahoo! pages, plunk them in a table and color code them if they dropped or rose by 5% or more. I had it choose which symbols to look at by giving it a list of industries and having it pull the ones with the biggest market caps.
It was a complete shot in the dark, but for a first pass it did surprisingly well at narrowing down things for me to investigate.
I've now run 3 "test cycles" with this system in which I invested around $10k (of imaginary money) and tracked my success. I learned a few things, and watched which patterns worked and which didn't.
With those lessons under my belt, I've now started working on version 2.
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