I. New AI College session starting October
This is your last chance this year to take the NeuroShell Trader Professional Advanced Course. The dates are Oct. 1 to Dec. 13. This is an online course you can take wherever you have a computer and Internet access. The focus is on practical, common sense usage of neural networks, traditional trading strategies, and genetic algorithms. The course consists of 39 lessons, which have a combined 69 slides, each with an audio clip, and 22 of them also have video clips. The audio and video segments are on a CD we send you and the rest of the lessons, including a class discussion forum, are on the web. For more information, visit www.aicollege.com and select course catalog. The first 5 people who register will receive a free granny coffee mug after they begin the class.
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II. Contacting Ward Systems
If you’ve called us lately you have noticed that after years of resisting, we finally installed a telephone answering system. Frankly, it became just too expensive to try to answer a busy bank of phone lines with real people. After all, we’re trying to be as efficient as possible so we can continue to serve you. We know of very few companies that still do technical support for people who purchased $195 software as many 14 years ago!
You can help us, however, by respecting the system we’ve set up. Please don’t use the sales number or “stay on the line” if you have technical support issues. We staff the technical support lines with enough people to handle the load, and you will rarely have to wait. We want you to get the right person, too.
And no we don’t have a toll free number. If we did, you would never get through to us! On balance, you will have to agree that it is better to get through to a support person quickly than to have a free call and wait for an hour.
You can also help us by familiarizing yourself with www.ward.net. To better help keep the support lines open for critical support issues, please check there first before you call or email.
While we’re on the subject, we’d like to ask for your help in making the email support more efficient too. We try to answer all email within 24 hours, but if you don’t give us enough information the first time, you will just delay getting an answer. Please send as much detail as possible, including screen captures, charts, templates, dlls, and data. Also be sure to send the steps possible to recreate the problem. Most people assume we are already familiar with their problem, but that is only true about 10% of the time. Always include your name and product serial number.
Sales@wardsystems.com is for questions about products you do not already own. Operations@wardsystems.com is for questions about the shipping of an order already placed. Support@wardsystems.com is for technical support. Send your email to the right place for fastest processing. Some people like to send to all of them, but that is not respecting our system, and won’t get an answer any faster.
One final message to NeuroShell Trader users: many of the questions you will have in the first three months of use will be answered in the videos that came with the product. Please review them again and again. All together about 90% of NeuroShell Trader support questions we receive can be answered in the help file, the videos or on www.ward.net.
We spend a lot of money making sure we provide among the best technical support in the industry. We hope you will help us keep that standard high.
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III. Price increase?
Yes, we are seriously considering an across the board price increase on our software. Like most companies, we have been hit with huge price increases in employee health care this year, and other cost increases. We haven’t decided to raise prices for sure, but we want to warn you in case you have been putting off purchasing something. Now is the time.
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IV. Investing and portfolio optimization – opinion from CEO Steve Ward
In my previous editorials I have bent your ear about how investing these days can be as risky as trading. Nevertheless I will tell you how you can provide some artificial intelligence in long-term investing. The technique is covered in more detail in my AI College class, even though it does not involve the NeuroShell Trader.
Long-term investing is a matter of picking stocks using fundamental indicators. Since fundamental indicators (earnings, dividends, debt, etc.) do not change very frequently they are not appropriate for model building in the NeuroShell Trader. Fundamentals usually don’t change but once a quarter or even less frequently. Since stock picking is a matter of predicting the long-term appreciation of an issue, you might think the NeuroShell Predictor is the best vehicle. Actually the NeuroShell Classifier is much better. Predicting the magnitude of a future stock price is very hard, but classifying whether there will be a price rise or a price drop is much easier.
The technique basically involves collecting fundamentals of x stocks every quarter over the last y quarters. That gives you x times y training patterns (rows in the Classifier). The output of each pattern is “buy” or “sell” depending on whether the price went up or down significantly within say 6 months of the date the fundamentals in the row were recorded. You can have variations, like maybe a buy net and a sell net. The buy net has outputs of “buy” and “don’t buy”, and the sell net has outputs of “sell” and “hold”. Your imagination and resourcefulness in collecting fundamental data are your only limitations.
So how to optimize your portfolio? The best vehicle around is GeneHunter, but be warned that GeneHunter is not for the timid computer user. It takes a lot of savvy about Microsoft Excel, and a good degree of analytic capability. GeneHunter comes with one example of balancing the portfolio to reduce risk while increasing profit, but there are many more techniques in the literature, most of which require some sort of optimization (i.e., GeneHunter again).
The big question is can you combine long-term stock picks using the Classifier with portfolio balancing using GeneHunter? I think so, but I haven’t thought about it much, so there’s a great area of research for the right person out there. You’ll need the RunTime Server, however, to fire those Classifier nets in Excel.
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V. No more newsletters in the future?
No, we aren’t ending this newsletter. But you will think we did if you change your email address and don’t send us your new one!
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