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The oil under that Texas prairie land has just about doubled in value in the last two years. TPL derives about half its cash flow from oil royalties. Other Texas oil and gas royalty trusts have appreciated 100% or so in the last two years. So that's a partial answer to your question. Martin

I was not able to short TKF or CHN today at Interactive Brokers, but RedSky had them. Of the stocks I have tried to short in the last few months, every single one was available at RedSky and less than a quarter were available at Interactive Brokers. I'm not affiliated with either broker other...

Rent. Heck, move to Pittsburgh, where you can still get a nice three bedroom house in a good neighborhood for $125k. If we were talking about a $50,000 capital gain that would be nuts. Where I live, people who've been in the same house for a decade are looking at gains of 300 or 400 large...

If the rent pays the mortgage. Where I live, you'd be lucky to cover 2/3 of the mortgage with rent income, before expenses. Rents have dropped every year since 2000. The house I'm renting now has a P/E ratio of ~27. This, to me, is the biggest sign of trouble in the market. The same thing...

The funny thing is, I agree with both sides of this argument. That just goes to show that y'all are completely talking past each other. Yes, real estate is a classic bubble right now. There is so much risk, so much downside, so little upside, the fundamentals couldn't be stacked up any higher...

Are you serious??? Who cares? It's not like your order is being sent by carrier pigeon. Even if you used a broker across the street the packets would probably go through California anyway. Martin

I'm in the same spot, I'm just starting to capture tick data. So I hardly have all the answers. But I've heard multiple people recommend IQFeed for reliability and data quality. However they have a $300 fee to get the API which is really irritating. For now I am just downloading data through...

You're right, incompetence or lack of knowledge or lack of dedication can lead to bad strategies. I was just trying to point out the converse, bad strategies do not mean incompetant trader. Even the best quant trader will have many bad ideas which is why we need to test our ideas extensively and...

Couldn't agree more. I'm not saying never optimize. I'm saying optimize only when necessary - when the actual performance does not meet requirements. Martin

Prophet, I'm not critiquing your system or your software, no need to get defensive. I am making generic recommendations for people writing backtesting and automated trading software, and my recommendation is to use a database, to focus on correctness and design rather than optimization, and...

Just to clarify this point, I certainly agree with Prophet that once you have a working, tested, valid strategy the natural thing to do is scale it up, get more data, widen to more markets, etc. I couldn't agree more and I am not arguing for complacency or resting on laurels. But all this leads...

Hi again Prophet, Another day of this? I guess so. :) If by optimization you mean designing good, efficient algorithms, then by all means we are in agreement. But, that is not the generally accepted definition in the computer science community. The design process should be focused on...

Hey Prophet, I think we're in violent agreement here. :) I'm not against optimization, I just think that someone just starting out with their implementation shouldn't worry about optimization right off the bat. As you say, your 90/10 rule is expressing much the same idea, so I don't think...

To refute your silly assertion, I guess. You said that one cannot do serious market analysis in 10 minutes a day of computer time. Fortunes have been made and Nobel prizes have been won using a lot less computation than 10 minutes on an Athlon 64. Not to say that I'm making a fortune or winning...

As far as analyzing tick data versus bar data, I think we've said all that needs to be said. Let the coder be the judge. :) Jeez... kids these days. If 10 minutes on a modern processor isn't enough to do real optimization, then clearly everyone analyzing the markets a decade ago was losing...

If I have a nightly data analysis program that takes 10 minutes to run, I could care less about a 4 order of magnitude improvement. It works, it makes the deadline, and optimizing the code may not be an effective way to spend my time. Instead, I could be designing a new strategy and reusing my...

Prophet, I'm not saying tick data is useless, I'm just saying it's harder to analyze than bar data. The algorithms and data structures are significantly more complex than using bar data. That statement holds for every single algorithm you have described. Also, as far as I can tell, your...

Tell me that after calculating the covariance of two sets of tick data. The problem is not just the increasing amount of data, it is the lack of a consistant time scale. Algorithms are more complex and if you want to address the problem efficiently you need more complex data structures. The...

Tick data is hard to work with efficiently no matter what data structure you use. IMHO, the only reason to stop using a transactional database as your backing store is if the total size of the database gets out of hand. So it depends on time resolution, number of symbols and how much history...

Sure, every application is different, etc. But I think there is a right way to handle large amounts of time series data, and that is to keep it in a true transactional database and then cache as necessary for performance. Using a database has all sorts of advantages (transactions, ease of...