ramblr

NICE scrubyt tutorial on scraping yahoo finance data… http://www.straw-dogs.co.uk/09/05/scrubyt-tutorial-dogs-of-the-ftse/

http://shanti.railsblog.com/scrubyt-tutorial-for-parsing-financial-data

scRUBYt! Tutorial for Parsing Financial Data
Posted on September 06, 2007

Doug Bromley has posted a scRubyt tutorial on how to parse Yahoo! stock data for the FTSE 100 index.

If you enjoyed my FSX Trader post/gem, check it out here .

Another neat library I discovered while tinkering with FSX is YahooFinance which can be used to get just about any stock data imaginable via a Yahoo! Finance CSV “api” of sorts.
Mini automated hedge fund, anyone?

With all these free services floating around and APIs available into them, it wouldn’t take much to put together an application that allowed individuals to put together a kind of mini automated trading hedge fund.

Professional traders I’ve spoken to about this have said that automated systems should be used to alert one to trading opportunities / possibilities, but not necessarily executing trades automatically (sans human intervention).

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/04/from-messes-to.html

http://www.bencurtis.com/resume/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_(poker_bot)

http://www.newscred.com is seriously pretty excellent

Mayor of New York City, founder of Bloomberg LP

I can’t remember who told me this, but I certainly didn’t grow up knowing it, so I must have gotten this advice at Salomon Brothers in the 1970s. The advice was, first, always ask for the order, and second, when the customer says yes, stop talking. I have watched more people make great presentations, whether they’re trying to sell to their family or in business or in government, and never get to the point of what they’re trying to get out of it. And too many times when the customer says yes, the person who got that answer just doesn’t stop talking. Worst advice? The worst advice that people can take is to react before they’ve had a chance to think. I think we all say things and wish we hadn’t said them. Ready, shoot, aim is not the smartest policy.

We were just talking about this in the office yesterday. Fortune has a “best advice I ever got feature” running and Mayor Mike gives that same advice http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/080…

And he adds a corollary…”when the customer says yes, stop talking”

more on asking:

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/05/ask-for-the-ord.html

http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/05/how-to-ask-for.html

How to “Ask for the Order”

Sign I just read Fred Wilson’s blog post about the need to ask for the order. I completely agree — if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-poker-bot

http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working-online-poker-bot-2

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/How+to+use+text_field_with_auto_complete

class PublishersController

def index
@publishers = Publisher.find(:all)
end

def autocomplete
render(:layout => ‘comicmrkt’)
end
end

http://comicmrkt.com/rails/publishers/autocomplete