keelix.com

Here's an attempt at a backtest of Mungofitch' CheapHigh screen from the Mechanical Investing board, updated to show both my "buggy" version and Jim's original:

CheapHighJim and CheapHighBug

After the upgrade some people were no longer able to log in, or got the message that they were not logged in when using the backtester. There was some cookie confusion at my end which should hopefully be fixed now. Please comment here if you are still having problems (but always try to log off and back on again just to make sure you get your cookie updated).

Over at the Mechanical Investing board, a user mentions pairs trading gold. I'm working on some new tools, and this gave me an excuse to run a simple test. Since GLD (a gold ETF) and/or GDX (gold miners ETF) has a fairly short history, I decided to test extending the history somewhat, creating a proxy for GDX and testing the ratio with the actual gold price. The goal with the proxy and gold price is to allow for a longer backtest.

For the GDX proxy I picked the US listed companies currently owned by the GDX ETF: AEM, ABX, AU, GFI, NEM, HMY. Comparing this proxy with GDX gives the following results:

GDX and proxy

At least over the period that the GDX ETF exists, this proxy isn't too shabby. But just to be on the safe side, let's compare the shape of the two ratios, GDX/GLD with proxy/goldprice:

In preparation for some new releases, I've done some upgrades to the site. Please let me know if you have any problems.

This site has users from a couple of communities that I participate in, and the polls below on this site was done for the Yahoo Groups TWSAPI community. My apologies to users from any other places that visit this site and got confused.

I will be away on vacation from when you read this until Friday, July 4th. I will be checking in
regularly to make sure things are ok, but I will not be posting weekly picks. Worst case, if the broadband
provider's router goes down (which it does every few weeks) I may not be able to get the site online again
until I am back.

I've moved the backtester onto another server for now. The original server seems to have developed instabilities over time. Normally, this means a harddisk is going down, but this time this was not the case. Also, the server was very stable when I tested the machine under heavy loads without disk IO. As a final test I had to pull out the harddrive and test it on another system to verify that the harddrive was not to blame. That leaves the motherboard as the primary suspect, and the chipset responsible for handling disk IO. Over time the machine started going down, first once every month, then every week, then every day and lately every minute. You get the picture.

Anyway, I've moved the backtester and picks over to a more modern system which should hopefully be able to handle it for a while without any trouble. I have disabled the links to the older sites as part of this process, but if there are certain articles you want to access send me an email and I will see if I can pull it out for you. I may or may not put the older sites back online later.

Thank you for your patience.

It seems a disk on the server hosting the backtester and the picks is having trouble, which is the reason why the backtester and the picks (and older archives) are sometimes not available. I'm working on replacing the disk, but I have no ETA for when things will be stable again. In the meantime I will be restartin the machine manually from time to time when I notice it is down. My apologies for any inconvenience.