The rich are different

As part of an exploratory dialogue someone from our old world (longevity) asked if we might use some data intelligence to tease out a relationship. The relationship in question was individual wealth versus size of life insurance policy. The relationship mattered because an investor holding longevity risk will see her returns suffer (substantially) as the […]

Harvesting medical data: a small project

Going through some old files I came across this piece of work we performed for a client some time ago – Search Project “…specific/sensitive biomarkers in certain cancers from the scientific literature and other online sources. For example might we be able to search in pancreatic or lung cancer for reports of biomarkers with say […]

gScore: some fun

We do occasionally allow ourselves some fun in the office (data-driven of course!)… Climbing App As you probably (don’t) know, Matt and I are avid climbers, and it seemed to us that there was no easy way of logging all your hard yards, 7c’s and broken fingernails over at the climbing wall. Hhmm, data, relationships, […]

Machine Reading

Grabbing electronic data from public sources is all very well, but what about processing and analytics? Any data type will succumb to analysis, pictures, sounds – you name it – but for now we will stick with numbers & words. And because it is not something that investors do every day, we’ll focus on the words first. […]

PDF is evil!

Hopefully you’re already convinced that you can grab whatever data you wish from webpages (and if not, later examples will hopefully tip the balance in our favour) but sooner or later you are going to ask about pdf. And let’s face it, when the latest report comes out that everyone wants to be able to […]

Combined Harvester

Let’s change gears, skip the code, and look at a harvester in action. Here’s the url for you to play with and a user-guide / description – Data Harvesting: Stock Prices From the S&P500 we choose up to 5 tickers for their daily adjusted-closes. Store those into memory with “Load Prices” against a time-frame of our […]

101 Data Harvesting

Building out a fully-fledged data-harvesting bot is not our purpose here, instead we will quickly demonstrate a 101 harvester in action against a financial variable. Even though simplified, the exercise is useful: the modules of work shown below are consistent for any level of complexity. Let’s work with FX since it is straightforward. (We’ll likely look at […]

A stupefying evening, one dead mouse and a python…

Late one evening reading Nathan Yau’s excellent “Visualize This” some years ago, I stumbled upon this undecipherable – url = ‘http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBUF/2009/1/1/DailyHistory.html’ page = urllib2.urlopen(url) soup = BeautifulSoup(page) dayTemp = soup.findAll(’span’)[4].text print dayTempurl = ‘http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBUF/2009/1/1/DailyHistory.html’ page = urllib2.urlopen(url) soup = BeautifulSoup(page) dayTemp = soup.findAll(‘span’)[4].text print dayTemp Apparently there were Pythons involved, the soup was a parser, […]