Trading & Finance
20 articles
Stocks Versus Bonds
Stocks vs bonds since 1871: the long run is real, and it is paid for
The Moving-Average Rule
The moving-average rule halves the worst crash, and in this backtest it also edged the market
Price Versus Earnings
Does the stock market actually follow earnings?
The Dividend Share of Returns
How much of the stock market's return is just dividends
Missing the Best Months
Sitting out the best months is expensive, and the worst months are next door
Cross-Asset Correlation
When the market breaks, stocks and oil stop diversifying each other
The Dollar's Gravity
The dollar's gravity: which currencies track it, and which float free
The Dow's Fat Tails
The Dow's worst month was a 5-sigma event that a bell curve says should never happen
The 2021 Inflation Surge
The 2021 inflation surge was the broadest in decades, not the worst
Gold in Real Terms
Gold made its real high in 1980, and has been losing the rematch ever since
150 Years of Drawdowns
150 years of S&P 500 drawdowns: the market is usually underwater
Market Seasonality
Sell in May, and other things the calendar does not actually tell you
Valuation and Returns
What you pay for stocks sets what you earn, and right now you are paying a lot
The Widow-Maker
Natural gas is the widow-maker, and the winter is where it earns the name
Forty Years of Oil Shocks
Forty years of Brent, and the shocks that define it
Apple Versus the Field
Apple turned $1 into $8.60. Everyone else mostly stood still.
On disabling ML in production
What I learned when my live trading system's ML ensemble silently degraded in production, and the disciplined reintroduction of machine learning that came after.
Anatomy of the VIX
The VIX spends most of its life bored, then loses its mind
Atlas in production: putting a forecasting system in front of real capital
How the Atlas forecasting system handles 542,000 rows/second of market data with sub-second regime detection — async service architecture, dependency-ordered startup, and 10Hz health monitoring.
How Atlas's database got 810× faster: a single-pattern fix
Atlas couldn't start. The trading system's database initialization was taking 6.6 seconds, blocking 37 features from loading. The fix was small.