Thursday, June 17, 2010

Open Request

I'm currently crawling EA for everyone's portfolio data. Yeah, it's just a snapshot of the market & I'm limited in how often I can update it, but I've got ways of making that happen.

In the meantime, Dups is overhauling the site's API. For the non-geeks out there, an API is an application programming interface; it's the means through which one application talks to another (example: Twitter's API allows EA to grab your tweets). I'd like to identify anything I & other programmers would like to have in the API while it's still being worked on.

Having said that, a great way to identify what should go into the API is by taking a look at possible uses for it. In terms of analysis, it means finding the lowest common denominator that allows for as many or all desired analyses to be carried out.

So here's my request: flood this post's comments with ways to look at this data. Have an idea? Post it. Have 10? Post them all! Hell, make 10 individual posts, if you like! Oh...and tell your friends to do the same thing. The sooner, the better.

Don't limit your thinking to what data I have or you think I have. Anything goes! If you want to analyze the market in a certain way, but it would require data you don't think is currently available, then specify what that data is & it'll be added to the list of requests.

If you want to actively contribute to the game in some way other than simply playing, this is it, so get to it!

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Clever Title Regarding Rakes

From Wikipedia: 'A rake (Old English raca, cognate with Dutch raak, German Rechen, from a root meaning "to scrape together," "heap up")'. Using the data I make available at Eavesdroppings, I'll analyze the market & create piles of interesting stocks. Some heaps may be fun/quirky (.ie stocks with prime number of followers over 100?), some could be aggregated trends (ie. top 20 most stable stocks for past month), and some could be straight-up, first-come, first-served, feeding frenzies (ie. 5 random stocks with 0 shareholders). Am I really stretching the rake metaphor for the sake of a lazy play on "market maker"? Yep. Does anyone care? Doubtful. In fact, I bet you've already opened the blog in another browser tab/window just to see if there are investor-less stocks listed.

If you've got your own analysis you'd like done on the data, let me know what you want in a comment, the game, or however (I'll look into what other options I could add to the blog to allow for it). Ideally, all of the content generated (aside from my commentary on it) for this blog will be automated. And if you can describe it, I'm confident I can code it. So speak up!