Sunday, October 4, 2015

Superinvestor Portfolio Winners and Losers

This is sort of just an administrative post:  I added to the 'pages' section a winners and losers sort of the Superinvestor portfolios.  This, I guess, is the companion to the Superinvestor screens.

It's just sorts the stocks in the portfolio by year-to-date returns.

I'm guessing with all of the volatility in the markets these days, this would make an interesting browse for some people.  

This is all just part of my recent hobby (coding), so I am doing this for fun; to see what it feels like to actually get some coding stuff into 'production', and see if I can make it as automated as possible so I don't have to do anything etc.

Superinvestor Portfolio Winners and Losers

13 comments:

  1. I haven't coded since the days of Basic, but I'm curious what language you're learning?

    Cheers,

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    1. All of this is done in Python. I started out with HTML/CSS and Javacript, then Python. I'm learning PHP and MYSql too. I too used to do Basic as a kid, but nothing useful...

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    2. Could you share any books/online resources you've used and found useful? Also, would you recommend to another (re-)beginner to do HTML/CSS first or just go straight to Python?

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    3. HTML/CSS is just webpage stuff so totally unnecessary for this sort of financial work (unless you want to create a website). Straight to Python is fine and actually Python is apparently one of the fastest growing programs and is used in more and more "introduction to programming" classes.

      For total beginners, I found Codecademy really great. I recommend it all the time to kids. It's an online course for various languages, and it's free. I haven't done it but Treehouse is also apparently really good. It's not free, though. Also there are places like Udemy and Udacity; those aren't free either. I've never taken any of those courses; I'm sort of a book guy. I love books and typing out the code examples, figuring out how to make it work etc...

      For me, the life-changing book was "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python". You can get your feet wet in Python with books like "Introducing Python" (O'Reilly) and then read that. This is the book that made me go, wait a minute, why am I wasting my time writing my own Pong game or Space Invaders in HTML5/Canvas/JS when I can do all this cool, useful stuff?!

      There is a book called Python for Finance too which is really good, but frankly, I have no interest in derivatives and creating financial models, monte-carlo simulations etc.

      But it was still interesting because it introduced me to various packages/modules you can use to do analysis (like Pandas, which was actually created by a quant hedge fund for analysis (AQR, I think)) and how to handle financial data etc...

      It's a great time to learn to code because you can find the answer to just about anything online these days. Get an error? Just google the error and you'll see that many have gotten the exact same error, lol...

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    4. Thanks a million. I've been away from coding for 25 years, like yourself and wondering where to start back. Much appreciated!

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  2. Adding to the language question, why did you decide to learn coding? Keep up the good work! Looking forward to your next post.

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    1. Well, it started out as a way to get my kid off playing video games, as in, "why don't you learn how to manipulate the computer and make it work for you instead of just being manipulated by it all day?". I figured if a little kid is going to sit in front of a computer all day, he might as well learn how to code. So I bought a beginner coding book. We both got hooked, but after some complications and difficulty, predictably, the kid lost interest but I kept going.

      First I was making lame websites and JS, HTML5/canvas games and then discovered a whole new world of practical use with Python etc...

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  3. I miss your posts.. please enlighten me some more :)

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  4. What do you think of using Tableau to make some of your data easier to visualize?

    https://public.tableau.com/s/

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    1. Sorry for the late response... I'll take a look at it.

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    2. Luk has been getting a lot of bad press on Seeking Alpha.Any update?

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    3. When Steinberg said that if you don't expect inflation, sell your LUK stock now at the last annual meeting Cumming/Steinberg chaired, he was so dead right. I didn't expect LUK to do well for a couple of years after the merger but didn't really expect them to be doing so badly. But again, a lot of this is cyclical pressure from the collapsing commodities, low interest rates and all sorts of other negative pressures in their area, so I don't think it's that smart people suddenly got stupid or anything like that.

      But because of the magnitude of the commodity bubble, it might take some time for things to turn... that's the problem with long cycles.

      Over time, if you allocate capital intelligently, you will do well (so LUK should do well too), but when the cycle turns down deeply, they may have to look like fools for a while.

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