In this issue:
I. Artificial Neural Networks and Job-specific Modules to Assess Occupational Exposure
II. NeuroShell Trader Professional wins again!
III. Day Trading – equities or futures? – Commentary by CEO Steve Ward
IV. One way to stop this newsletter
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I. Artificial Neural Networks and Job-specific Modules to Assess Occupational Exposure
Dr. Jim Black and his colleagues at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, have done some groundbreaking research in occupational assessment using neural nets. With NeuroShell, they were able to predict exposure to a common occupational hazard. Below is the abstract of their paper “Artificial Neural Networks and Job-specific Modules to Assess Occupational Exposure” which was published in the Annals of Occupational Hygiene, Vol 48, No. 7, PP 595- 600, 2004.
“Job-specific modules (JSMs) were used to collect information for expert retrospective exposure assessment in a community-based non-Hodgkins Lymphoma study in New South Wales, Australia. Using exposure assessment by a hygienist, artificial neural networks were developed to predict overall and intermittent benzene exposure among the module of tanker drivers. Even with a small data set (189 drivers), neural networks could assess benzene exposure with an average of 90% accuracy. By appropriate choice of cutoff (decision threshold), the neural networks could reliably reduce the expert’s workload by about 60% by identifying negative JSMs. The use of artificial neural networks shows promise in future applications to occupational assessment by JSMs and expert assessment.”
Contact:
Dr Jim Black MBBS(Hons) PhD FAFPHM DTM&H MCommH
Head – Epidemiology
Victorian Infectious Diseases Service and
Centre of Clinical Research Excellence in Infectious Diseases
Royal Melbourne Hospital
Grattan Street, Parkville, 3050
Australia
Phone: +61 3 9342 8897
Fax: +61 3 9342 7277
James.Black@mh.org.au
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II. NeuroShell Trader Professional wins again!
For the third year in a row our customers have voted us #1 in the Artificial Intelligence category of the annual Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine competition. We are grateful for your support in this contest because people look to those ratings to make purchase decisions. New income enables us to continue research and development, as well as provide the same great technical support to which you are accustomed. So thanks again for getting out the vote, and keep telling people about NeuroShell.
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III. Day Trading – equities or futures? – Commentary by CEO Steve Ward
I’m not a registered investment advisor, nor a CPA, nor a professional trader, nor anything resembling any of those, so please be aware that what follows is my personal opinion and belief – not professional advice.
When I first started trading (which wasn’t until we created NeuroShell DayTrader Professional, years after our first neural network programs were written), I wanted to day trade, simply because I saw so much happening during the day. The nightly news would say the market was down only 3 points, but if you looked at an intraday chart you might see that it opened up 5 points, proceeded to rise another 20 points, and then dropped 28 points in the afternoon. You get an entirely different perspective when you look at an intraday chart. Not only that, but if there’s really bad news overnight, you are out of the market, so you won’t wake up in the morning with a big loss created while you slept.
The issues of day trading stocks, however, are daunting. First off, I recall that if you day trade round trip 4 or more times in a 5-day period, you need a margin account with at least $25,000 in it. Next, you can’t go short unless there’s an uptick. Then finally, none of your day trading gains are long term – all short term.
Contrast that with day trading Emini index futures, S&P or NASDAQ. Many brokers will open an account with only $5000 or less in it, because there’s no bad “day trader” connotation and no 4-trade limit. No worry about upticks; you can go short whenever you like. Here’s the best part – 60% of your gains are LONG term, even if you were in only 15 seconds! (see IRS section 1256 rules.)
I don’t trade single stock futures, but I understand even they give you the aforesaid benefits except for the section 1256 60%/40% rule.
Of course, there are dangers. You are so highly margined that you can lose $100 in a minute with just one contract in a fast moving market. BUT – you can make $100 in a minute too. You definitely have to watch what’s going on.
I can’t watch what’s going on, because I can’t sit at my desk and day trade all day. I have a demanding day job, after all, and I’m on the phone a lot. But more than that, I’ve found it isn’t easy to build models that work all day long, day in and day out. So I build models that specialize in certain time periods of the day. I’ll build one that gets into the market at say 10:00 AM EST, and gets out at say 10:15. I might have another that fires at 2 PM, and gets me out by 2:30. Any optimization I do (like when I find weights in the Neural Indicators addon) becomes focused to that time of day. The model evolves to ignore the rest of the day, thus allowing it to concentrate on a smaller problem. I know in advance exactly what time I’m going to trade so I can schedule that, and I only have to consult the NeuroShell oracle to see whether I’m going long or short at that time.
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IV. One way to stop this newsletter
Just change your email address and don’t tell us.
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