Digital Dave

This is my first involvement in this sort of financial disaster and I have to admit that it has been one hell of a ride.  It definitely takes a gut of steel to stomach these steep declines in the market, and I’ve got to imagine that we are close to a bottom.

But just remember, every disaster has a bottom.  Professional investors are just sitting on the side lines with their cash on hand to dive right back into the action.  I’m looking at stocks that are extremely discounted because they have been beaten to death. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with these companies! People just jumped off the ship because they were scared as hell.  Which, is a natural reaction.  Nobody in their right mind wants to lose money.  But if you sell, you LOCK IN those losses.  If you don’t sell, you have time on your side to recover that money unless you are very close to retirement.

And you’ve got to realize.  You’re not the only one getting thumped.  Order will restore itself eventually, and I believe it’ll happen pretty soon.

In other news, this job search is a pain-in-the-butt.

I can say without a shadow-of-a-doubt that network contacts are so freaking vital it’s not even funny.  It’s not like I didn’t know this (see: Darius, this applies to even more than the gamedev industry), but seeing the value of it first hand is mind blowing and it really makes me wish I would have pounded MUCH harder on it.  So if you are a freshman or sophomore, listen up.  Get on it.

It doesn’t help when you are searching for a job in a recession, nor does it help when you are applying during the time when companies typically go through a hiring lull (Fall).

I’m optimistic.  I know I’m valuable.  I’ve been admired by those who have led me, and those who have followed me.  I also know how hard I work in a business environment.  I mean, hell, some day I want to be an entrepreneur.  Not just an entrepreneur, but a successful entrepreneur.   Raw passion, an eye for initiative driven opportunities, and a motivated attitude all drive my work ethic.

65 days until graduation.  I’m excited.

You might be happy to know that I am putting up an installer for Breakout Returns on the website.  I’ve been meaning to do this since, well, since I made it… But for some reason I just never got around to doing it.  Okay, I didn’t feel like fiddling with installers at the time.  The beast used to be around 23MB, but I spent the last hour knocking it down to 11.3MB.

It has been up on GameDev.NET and has had about 740 plays.

Download Breakout Returns

Well the ball has started rolling on this finance project.

I’m working with a finance professor here at Kansas State to do some research on momentum trading.  If you are not finance savvy, the method of trading resembles exactly what the word means.  It’s all about chasing returns.  This is probably one of the most confusing aspects of finance, believe it or not.   Does it really exist?  That’s the million dollar question.  Some of these research papers break out some long winded equations.  Others bring it down to more of an investor behavior.   And none of these papers are confident in their findings…

Anyway, that’s the boring stuff.

My role, beyond understanding the method of trading a little, is to write an application to help my professor study this stuff.  I still don’t have the exact details, but what I can say is that I get to deal with a massive amount of data.   We’re looking at daily, and monthly, data over the past 7 years to analyze.   Not, bad… Right?  Yeah, well, this is dealing with the over 4,000 companies.  So we’re looking at around 8,000,000 entries for the daily returns, and around 700,000 for the monthly returns.   Each of these entries will have around 5-10 things associated with them (stock price, ticker name,  daily return, volume traded, etc).

Obviously, the kudos points really come from developing a program to analyze this data fast and memory efficient.

I still haven’t decided on what language I’m going to write this in.  I need to find some comparisons on file reading, among other things, with java, c#, and C++.

I have a meeting with the professor next week so hopefully I’ll get to write some more detailed information.  Until then I’m writing a bunch of test/performance code to get an idea of what might work the best in terms of speed.