Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

I've got a storied career. I went from being a draft resister hippie type near the end of the Vietnam War to being an expediter at a nuclear power plant construction company near Wall Street, then finally left New York for warmer weather in Florida where I spent a couple of years as a real estate broker and eventually landed at Merrill Lynch as a financial consultant. I stayed at Merrill for about 8 years. It was at Merrill that I first became interested in programming. I had been graphing the technical indicators from Bob Farrell's group in New York with colored pencils and there was an older guy at the Orlando office who had a TRS-80 and printer. So I learned to program the indicator data in BASIC and print out graphs. Before long I had saved up $3500 to buy an Apple IIe and began seriously studying BASIC. Later I enrolled in an external doctoral program to get my PhD in economics, and a good part of my dissertation was spent coding FFT algorithms in Turbo Basic. Later on...

There seems to be a bit of confusion from some commenters. This is not my programmning blog, although in the past I have posted technical content. This is my "everything" blog - I write about politics, science, psychology and other subjects here. If you want my programming blog, it is at peterbromberg.net  - there is only technical content there. Thanks!

I’ve been involved with the stock market since the early 80’s when I was a rookie broker with Merrill Lynch in Orlando. In fact probably the main reason I got out of stock trading and into programming was because I spent more time looking at the technical indicators than selling stocks and mutual funds! Back in the 1970’s legendary market guru Norman Fosback developed a “Daily Market Forecast” index that had an uncanny accuracy with predicting the direction of the next day’s market. Most of the items I have in this article were included in that index. There is a page on Yahoo Finance, http://finance.yahoo.com/advances   which provides most of these indicators daily. Another page on the WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-tradingdiary2.html   provides the daily TICK and TRIN (Arms index) that are also components of Fosback’s indicator. I put together a console application that can be run daily via Task Scheduler to scrape these values daily and store them in...

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of any extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.   --Marshall McLuhan Now here's the thing: I'm on Twitter; I like it because I can follow anybody I want, and although there is an awful lot of moronic "noise" (e.g., "I have a hangover and my cat just threw up"), there is also some interesting stuff that lets you find out where others in your particular "groove" are going, what they are working on, what they're thinking about. You can even post a request for help and occasionally somebody that's following you will give you a helpful idea. The problem is, this is just a "teaser" of what it really could be , and it's totally disconnected from all the other "social" apps. It doesn't connect you to ...

Usually around major holidays I become a bit more reflective and I "Reflected" recently on my kinda / sorta "evolution as a programmer". I started programming seriously on an Apple IIe (and a bit on Commodore 64's) - at the time I was a broker with Merrill Lynch in Orlando, and I was fascinated by the Technical Analysis Department up in New York. These guys, like Bob Farrell and Phil Rettew, who've become legendary, would post their daily market calculations on the Quotron screens (for those who aren't old enough to know, the Quotron system was a hard-wired network with small monitors and keyboards for the brokers. The monitor had a screen with one glorious color - "puke green"). I started out copying down the TRIN, put/call and other indicators onto graph paper with colored pencils. It was fascinating (so fascinating that I eventually left the business when I realized I was more interested in technical analysis than sales!). While other brok...