Announcement: Moving to enjine.com
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit: bearsky23 / Shutterstock.com   I started this blog in the year of 2013. I was a bright eyed newbie entrepreneur at the time, with the ambition to create a robo-advisor before the term "robo-advisor" was even a thing. But instead of raising a whole bunch of money to create a robo advisor, I wanted to test out the concept first. So, I created MoneyGeek, a platform to help DIY investors. It was only after launching MoneyGeek that I started to understand how hard running a business is. I struggled in particular with how to get MoneyGeek's name out. I realized that it didn't matt ..read more
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My University Admissions Story And The Pitfalls Of Using Simple Algorithms
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
  We recently shot a short video describing our company, and it begins with the story of how I originally came to Canada from Ireland. You can watch the video below:   In the video, I explained that I had applied to some Canadian universities, and that the first letter I got was a rejection from McMaster. However, I didn’t get to explain why they rejected me in the video. I had applied to three universities in Canada: the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and McMaster. Of the three, I viewed McMaster as my fallback choice in case I couldn’t get into either ..read more
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Why Machine Learning Hasn't Caught On In Finance - A Theory
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit: eamesBot / Shutterstock.com   You’d think that machine learning would thrive in finance. After all, the whole industry operates on data. Banks look at your credit history (data!) before they approve your mortgages. Credit card companies look at payment patterns (data!) to sniff out fraud. Investors use financial statements (data!) to select stocks to invest in.  Anytime there’s an abundance of data, you can often use machine learning to make better decisions, more quickly and with lower costs. You may therefore be surprised to learn not only that machine learning adoption ha ..read more
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FRDM - The Better Way To Invest In Emerging Markets
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock.com   Owning emerging market stocks could benefit your investment portfolio in two ways. First and more obvious, owning emerging market stocks would make your portfolio more diversified, thereby lowering risk. Second, emerging market economies tend to grow much more quickly than developed economies, so many people assume that emerging market stocks will outperform developed market stocks. Unfortunately, that second assumption has not held up in recent years. The following chart shows the comparative performances of the Vanguard FTSE Emerging Marke ..read more
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The Bias/Variance Trade-off And The Limits of Machine Learning Models
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit: pathdoc / Shutterstock.com   A Machine Learning model is a bit like a marriage - no matter how hard you try, it's never going to be perfect. The same way every marriage has its issues, so does every machine learning model. Real world data is like real world people: unpredictable. Real world events don’t conform precisely to a perfectly predictable pattern, so no matter how clever your algorithm, there will always be some irreducible error. The trick is to focus on the things you can change - the reducible error. If you’re in a marriage where there are some communication issue ..read more
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Is Passive Investing A Bubble?
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit: EtiAmmos / Shutterstock.com   Within each industry, there are certain topics that divide participants and make them battle each other with religious fervour. Among programmers, the topic might be Windows vs. *nix. Among physicists, I’ve heard of dissent against string theory. There are several topics that similarly divide financial professionals. One such topic revolves around the issue of whether passive investing is harmful or beneficial to financial markets. Passive investing, in contrast to active investing, involves an attempt not to pick individual stocks. Instead, it ..read more
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Outlier Detection: Border Security For Your Model
MoneyGeek
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4y ago
Image Credit:  zhu difeng / Shutterstock.com   You might not know it, but outlier detection is a big part of your life. The ability to notice  diseased or rotten food, or spot a person in a crowd who might be unstable or dangerous is a very important human skill. Many of us had extra detection-training as children.  So can we reliably spot outliers? For extreme examples, we're pretty good. Say you ask 100 people, “what is the ideal indoor temperature?” and 99 of them answer, “somewhere between 16 and 22 degrees Celsius”, while the other one answers, “banana”. You don't have to be a Family ..read more
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Can Yield Curves Predict Stock Market Direction? - A Machine Learning Perspective
MoneyGeek
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5y ago
Image Credit: dani3315 / Shutterstock.com   Many investors are concerned about the yield curve today. Generally speaking, a positive sloping yield curve (i.e. where long term interest rates are higher than short term rates) portends future economic health. By contrast, negative sloping yield curves (a.k.a. “inverted” curves) have tended to precede recessions. Today, the yield curve is the most inverted it’s been since before the financial crisis. This has led some investors to wonder: should they sell stocks today to protect their portfolios? Or should they hold onto them because, despite ..read more
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Discontinuing MoneyGeek's Portfolios
MoneyGeek
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5y ago
Image Credit: William Potter / Shutterstock.com   On the first Monday of every month (like today), I normally give an update on MoneyGeek’s portfolios. But as you can tell from the title, today is different. Today, I’ve decided to remove the model portfolios feature from this website. I know that many of you have been using my model portfolios to invest real money, so I feel that I owe you a full explanation.  Early last year, I started work on a successor website to the model portfolios’ page. I called it ‘Portfolio Expo’, and it was going to contain some big enhancements. PE would have ..read more
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The Zeta Coefficient – A New Way to Forecast Returns Using Risk
MoneyGeek
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5y ago
Image Credit: Debby Wong / Shutterstock.com Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing Warren Buffett As far as superhuman powers go, the ability to accurately forecast returns probably wouldn't be many people's first choice. It's not as sexy as super speed or laser eyes. But, imagine the edge you'd have as an investor if you could look at an opportunity and predict the returns with precision. You would essentially remove all of the risk from investing: you'd be playing the game on easy mode! Risk and returns are inter-twined. If you can assess risk accurately, you can generally predi ..read more
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