Magical Widget
Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:00PMIn a frictionless, costless, and magical world, I would have a magical widget that allows me to interact with financial data in the following fashion.
From any program I could make a call resembling this:
Get (ticker A, market capitalization, source of information) =====> output = accurate theoretical market capitalization for ticker A
I could use this widget to run algorithms in spreadsheets, program scripts, and so forth. I could search for companies trading well below (or above) their theoretical market capitalization and make lots of money.
My goal is to find or develop this tool in the real world.
GoogleFinance's structure most closely resembles what I am looking for but the set of attributes is very small. It is a start though, and a window into the future.
In the meantime, information gatekeeping and speed bumping will continue to be a very good business.
Maybe Amazon.com's Mechanical Turks can be used to bypass the gatekeepers. Perhaps also the Twitter API.
Do you know of any cool financial tools that can get me closer to my goal? Is my magical widget something you would use if it existed?
Would this be something useful?
Get (AAPL, AMZN cointegration 5yrs, Bigger Capital) =====> cointegration of AAPL and AMZN over a 5 year period
Written by Michael Bigger. Follow me on Twitter and StockTwits.
Reader Comments (1)
Hi Michael,
you can already do what you suggested, it's free and you can have it running in less than an hour! All you need is R the statistical programming language ( cran.r-project.org ), R-Studio (rstudio.org ) and an account with Amazon (aws.amazon.com) to run EC2 instances. (i.e.tutorial: http://bioconductor.org/help/bioconductor-cloud-ami/ ). There are lots of AMI's ( Amazon Machine Images ) with the above mentioned programs preinstalled available.
With R-packages like Quantmod, PerformanceAnalytics etc. you can download historical data, do your stuff, plot it, generate buy orders or do whatever you like. ( You can use any device which can run in a browser, anywhere where you have access to the internet.. Even your iPhone! )