ICT Day 9

i am getting quite sick of this.

quite an interesting case today – dude has a housing debt issue 8k in arrears so came asking for a deferment so he can work to pay it off. and he has 4 kids. who cares?

people like them slip thru the cracks and is never reached for help – i dunno when his 4 kids can ever get out of this spiral…

one of the better things is the different profiles u see

people arranging concerts/stripteases helping with money laundering

people running their own practices earning >20k a mth

all craving money and getting into the spiral of material coverting…

 

on a side subject – the 2 weeks of not workign out daily is having a really weird effect on the body – it feels so tired and aching all over – i think i need a daily dosage of pain or something – else body is just crying out for it….

ICT Day 8

one week down, one more to go.

day was stupid as usual – but at least no Sempang for me!

got the puter all setup – the speed and the memory feels sweeeeet….

 

Tanjong Beach Swim

Time doesn;t fly – it gallops and whips away like a crazy bitch.

long weekend is over and soon it is time for the ICT torture again.

tried the Tanjong beach for a swim and it was much nicer than ECP. same salty water but it was cool having a lil island in front of u to swim towards…i think i’ll be back for quite a few weekends!

bot a new desktop – Acer Aspire XS3470- figured i need a better puter if i am gonna process the info better than the netbook….

OWS swim ECP

well it wasn;t much of a swim but rather fun nonetheless.

parked @ F1 ECP, and just dipped in the water, swimming towards a buoy (somehow there is a black buoy near the bedok jetty), practicing sighting etc.

as usual OWS swims are totally foreign to pool – the sight beneath water was ZERO. and the waves (calm as they are) makes sighting and breathing difficult – and the salty water is just disgusting. It’s tough to find a way to make the swim fun though – if there’s a little island or something i can swim towards, it will be ideal. or some sorta loops …

2 other dudes were swimming as well, along the coast – was good to watch it….pity i am missing the biathlon next saturday ={

on the way back saw the NTU bike rally on the way – honestly it is rather dangerous with them hogging the roads and no clear group…i wonder how many accidents there will be today…

Download Free Historical Quotes from Yahoo Finance

The script below will download FREE Historical Stock Quotes from Yahoo Finance base on the list of stock quotes you entered.

Most of the websites out there offer you to Historical Quotes download but you have to pay for it. In eTraderZone, we are not only show you how to download FREE Historical Quotes, but also give you the source code so that you can modify it to suit to you own needs.

Historical Stock Quotes
Historical Quotes downloaded will be stored into a individual spreadsheet according to the stock symbol name. This is one of the many great option provided by Yahoo Finance, while many others service provider charge you for download but Yahoo Finance give it for free. You just need this little tool to help you to download in bulk.

Yahoo Finance
Go to http://finance.yahoo.com/ and key in the stock quote and click on the Historical Prices on the left pane, scroll to the bottom and you should see the link “Download To Spreadsheet”.

By default 5 years daily data will be downloaded but you can alter the timeframes. The name of the file is “table.csv” and the data downloaded contains Date, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume and Adj Close, it’s in descending order by Date.

Login or Register to download this Excel Spreadsheet

In order to download historical quotes in batch, we need to understand and study the URL parameters provided by Yahoo Finance. Let’s take a look at the URL string below:

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=INTC&a=06&b=9&c=1986&d=2&e=5&f=2008&g=d

The URL string above will download daily historical data for INTC (Intel) from 6th of July 1986 (Intel went IPO) until 5th March 2008 into a file call table.csv.

Let’s break down the URL string and take a look of the parameter one by one.

http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv – The default URL to download historical stock quotes, it won’t work if you change the ‘table.csv’ to something else.

s – This is where you can specify your stock quote, if you want to download stock quote for Microsoft, just enter it as ‘s=MSFT’

a – This parameter is to get the input for the start month. ’00′ is for January, ’01′ is for February and so on.

b – This parameter is to get the input for the start day, this one quite straight forward, ’1′ is for day one of the month, ’2′ is for second day of the month and so on.

c – This parameter is to get the input for the start year

d – This parameter is to get the input for end month, and again ’00′ is for January, ’02′ is for February and so on.

e – This parameter is to get the input for the end day

f – This parameter is to get the input for the end year

g – This parameter is to specify the interval of the data you want to download. ‘d’ is for daily, ‘w’ is for weekly and ‘m’ is for monthly prices. The default is ‘daily’ if you ignore this parameter.

With all the parameters above, you can now construct a URL to download historical prices for any stock quotes you want. But if you are going to download all historical prices for a stock quotes from day one onward (eg: Intel), you don’t need to crack your head to look for information such as when is Intel went IPO. You just need to ignore the start and end date as follow:

eg: http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=INTC

If you only specify the start date and ignore the end date, it will download everything right from the start date until the most current prices.

eg: http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=INTC&a=00&b=1&c=2000

20km run on Duathlon day

hmm went for a 20km run – LSD in nature cos i wanted to check out the Duathlon.

the intent is to check out the elites but actually it is rather tough to do that – either u go there early and wait for ages for them to T1 or finish or u stand by the side and wait for them to zoom by but either way the moment takes maybe a couple of minutes so it is rather waste of time..still – was nice to see some dudes zoom by in the aero tuck on the TT bike – i guess the Aviva ironman will be a better gawk-fest.

route

pace was actually faster than i expected – was a chick in front who was doing a decent clip and i just fell in step – took a while before i realised i was breaking the intent and so broke the rhythm.

overall a good run but it was quite disturbing that i am still unable to do the 20km effortlessly – it still takes a lot of mental strength to carry on after 15km

 

ICT Day 5

well shit starts to hit once the ICT proper starts and the true faces of human nature hits u in the face like a heavy sledge of shit.

the hierarchy – the i-am-higher-in-rank-than-you-so-kiss-my-ass faces starts appearing and it is just a sick reflection of what real world is about.

anyway have the next 2 days off so it is back to camp on Tuesday – that’s good!

bit of bad news today – someone had to out-pro today- apparently had to go to AnE – seems that it is throat cancer related or something.

we have had lunch 3 days back talking abt the reasons of quitting smoking – apparently he was coughing up blood or something – never expected it to be so serious…i hope the guy ends up alright…..

quit smoking. it is a real killer.

ICT Day4

well it’s confirmed that both Sat are gone – so there goes the duathlon+biathlon…argh…

so yet another day of useless ness – i was quite surprised to find the 2.4km passing time to be 12 min! so that’s 2min per lap! so thats 12km/h…that’s quite fast for people who in general do not exercise.

greatest accomplishment is finishing the book More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

This is prob the best book i’ve read for a while – it’s interesting to read the trading styles of the various giants : Robertson, Steinhardt, Soros, Druckenmiller, Griffin, Simmons, Tudor etc.

can i do it? can i find a strategy?

30laps of the pool with sighting – slowing down more and more now that i am thrashing and all the subtleties are out of the window – 36:30min so a confirmation of the timing 2 days back….

ICT Day 3

Day 3 and the advance party comes in. Lotsa funny cases that is typical of the SAF – people who dun get the SAF100 but yet asked to come in (and i guess they need to do another formal one WTF)

another day of useless-ness but hey i am >50% thru the book and prob gonna bring a new one in.

Looks like all my Sat’s gone so sayonara to the Duathlon as well as the Biathlon (arghhhhh)

SAF is a fucking bitch.

ICT Day 2

another free and easy day – spent the day reading a really good book – 1/3 of the way thru – reviews once i am done.

there was an reopening of a SGD 5y bond – i was rather surprised to see it paying a coupon rate of 2.375% – but alas – it was too good to be true – bid of the dude cannot be at par – current yield curve says the YTM is prob gonna end up ard 0.46% – i rather use the cash to do something else than that….

am rather interested though, to start buying some bonds…let’s see what else interesting stirs – but looks like SGS bonds are going to be worthless for a while and perhaps we should look at some corporate bonds now that they are trading on the secondary…

had a 1600m (?) swim so a mile – 38:45 with sighting – the legs are really tired for some reason – guess the 20km did a lot of damage – strange that with the rest from not biking the muscles seem to be remonstrating…