CASTrader Blog

GStock

I just found out about GStock. It is billed on their website as follows: "GStock is a Virtual Supercomputer formed by many computers calculating a huge amount of investment stratagies with one goal - To pick the best profit making strategy for each stock." 

They continue: "With its humongous computing power, GStock tests over a billion investment strategies PER STOCK. Strategies are tested on years of trading data, and eventually produce the best investment strategy PER STOCK. Notice that it is not one single strategy that is applied to all stocks as done by lame investment tools and stock picking services which try to convince you as if one trading strategy for all stock is sufficient .. as if, technology companies stocks behave like oil companies stocks. Companies, markets, core investors and operations are different - using the same strategy for all stock just doesn't make sense. That is why we find the best strategy that fits like a glove for every single stock. and it works like a charm!"

An interview with the co-founder, Oren Rossen, reveals: "We have a donor who is extremely wealthy and who believes that the next big thing is supercomputing based on grid or distributed computing. He is willing to pore large sums of cash on a project that would both have a technological edge and be commercially viable. However, we don't have a clue what can be done commercially with so much computing power."

A press release says: "A recent test of GStock’s massive computing system over a two and a half year period yielded an average 5.1% return per trade over a 53-day period, with 21,000 of the 30,000 trades yielding profits - a 70% success rate."  This is astonishing if there are no caveats.

{digital}alchemy is skeptical: "I wouldn't put too much stock (pun intended) in the buy and sell signals, but GStock is an interesting idea. It's got a nice user interface so it's a useful site if only for that."  They point out that your can download past trading alerts.

I have no opinion on the merits of this concept one way or another except that it's a cool idea, and needless to say, I'd love to know what these guys are doing, exactly.

Postscript academic paper viewing

I try to keep this blog on topic, but this trick is too good to pass up.  Several key academic finance papers are only available in Adobe postcript as far as I can tell.  Am I the only Windows user that finds it incredibly annoying not to have a built in Postscript viewer in Windows?  Postscript is over 20 years old for Pete's sake.  Google will convert Postscript files to text if they show up in search, but it often mangles the file to the point of being unreadable.  You can buy Adobe Acrobat to view the files, or you can get some open source software to view and print Postscript files, but the easiest method of all in my opinion is to use an online Postscript to Adobe PDF file converter.  A few seconds and you're done, and no software to install.  One wonders why Google can't do this.