Is stock trading doomed?

Brace yourself: We may be headed towards a world dominated by a handful of tech corporations vying with each other to develop the best AI prediction algorithm.

That's from "Microsoft Bing Predicts and the future of gambling" at ExtremeTech. That article discusses how Microsoft Bing correctly picked winners for week one of the NFL season. That's groundbreaking, but the stuff about computer trading has been going on for some time now. People are still arguing as to whether it has caused market crashes, but there's no doubt that the best software with the quickest Internet connections has great advantages over anyone else.

A lone wolf day trader probably isn't going to do well against that. Without access to a firehose of data and the software to analyze it, he or she won't be able to compete at the same level.

I'm not sure what that means for the rest of us.

Microsoft Bing Predicts and the future of gambling

Algorithmic trading

Bing Predicts

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Anonymous asks:

How can I carry forward unused money in Mint? Mint doesn't let you carry Income forward.

Any other Mint accounts can carry forward money you don't spend, but there is nothing to carry truly unused and unbudgeted income.

One solution is to create a "Carried" account and adjust it whatever "Left Over" shows on the Budgets tab. Have that account start each month with anything left in it. From now on, anytime you need to change that amount because of extra income or a new budget category, do it by adding a transaction manually to draw from or add to that account. Or just put anything extra directly into that account. This should then always show "extra" money.

However, should you enter deficit spending, this becomes less useful and more confusing.

You can just go by the Net Income Over Time in Trends. Over a long enough period, this does show if you are gaining or losing money, but when your income is variable, it also can be confusing.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Let me first say that if you were just starting with QB Online and not converting existing data, you'd probably be happy. I'll quickly add that I am not unhappy; it's just that the switch did have some rough spots.

We have used Quickbooks for years. I haven't been entirely happy with it, but I've never found the time to write my own system and that's the only way I could get everything I want. So for fifteen years or so, Quickbooks has been "good enough". It's done the job, but always left me grumpy.

Part of that grumpiness was cost. If you upgrade regularly and maintain support, it's actually less expensive to use the cloud version (which includes support in the monthly fee). It's also more convenient as I can now do basic functions from anywhere with my iPhone and iPad. Ahh, but getting used to it is something else all together. Figuring out how to reconcile how it wants to do things against how we want them done can be a challenge.

For example, invoicing. What I prefer to do is print invoices to a PDF file and then send an email cover letter with the PDF as an attachment. What QBO wants to do is store the invoice in the cloud and send the customer a link to it. I don't mind that - in fact, it's better because they can pay by credit card or bank transfer directly from that link. But I do not like that the email comes from Quickbooks. I'd rather it came from me.

Fixing that is easy enough. Quickbooks pulls email addresses from customer info, but allows that to be edited. I select and copy those addresses so that I can temporarily replace them with my own. I have QBO send the invoice to me and then I put back the correct customer emails. I now have the correct link in that email which I can put in my own email to my customer. It would be easier if I could just get the links directly from QBO, but this works.

Handling bank and credit card accounts is also very different, though as it turns out, much easier. QBO grabs transactions from those accounts online and brings them in for approval. You simply need to accept them into Quickbooks, which is a very quick process, especially after it learns what accounts are typical for specific transactions. If it's already in QBO, for example a check that you entered, the bank transaction will match what you've already done and you simply accept the match. The end result of all this is that when it's time to reconcile, almost all the work is already done for you. Reconciling took me all of fifteen seconds when I first did it!

There is some clumsiness to QBO - it's not a fully polished product. However, it saves me time and money so it's "good enough" for me.

Quickbooks Online

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The link below advances the idea that doctors and lawyers may lose their jobs to AI before many other professions.

Doctors and lawyers are much easier to automate than street sweepers. In fact, one of the big successes of machine learning is that you can take a simple algorithm, give it a database of patient records and it learns to diagnose diabetes or breast cancer better than people who have spent years in Med school.

At first that shocked me. After all, don't the words "brilliant" and "doctor" juxtapose often? How many times have you heard "brain surgery" used as an example of intelligence? To a lesser extent, lawyers - at least the highly succesful ones - get similar treatment.

Yet isn't surgery just dexterity combined with knowledge? Isn't medical diagnosis mostly a matter of having a prodigious memory? The same could be said for legal work.

We are already starting to see some of that in both fields. Paralegals are being replaced by computers and computer surgery is already becoming common. It's happening.

However, I think that neglects the political component. The minimum wage worker who loses their job to AI has little political power. Doctors and lawyers are quite a different class. I am quite certain that neither will allow their livelihoods to be taken over by AI. They'll fight politically by enacting legislation that ensures their jobs - they aren't going to end up unemployed.

Your thoughts?

How Artificial Intelligence Will Revolutionize Our Lives

The Era of Mass Employment Is Ending

Why a fruit sorting robot will disrupt industrial automation

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

For those just joining us, Ezoic is a "web site improvement platform". They take your site content, repackage it and spit it out to the world. The engine selects templates and tests results: what is the bounce rate, how much engagement, what's the ad CTR and so on. The algorithm then gives more face time to the templates that perform well, but templates don't get to live on their laurels - testing never stops.

There is nothing that Ezoic does you could not do yourself, but it would truly be a lot of work and would command your full attention constantly. My site, the site you are at right now, has been template driven for years. I experimented with layouts and ad placements and at one time made a decent amount of money. That all changed in 2011 when Google implemented new search algorithms which were intended to weed out junk sites. My content was not junk, but I got caught by collateral damage and my search traffic plunged. You can see that plainly in this graph from Semrush.com.

There was a second plunge you can see in August of 2013. That's the one that really crushed me. It was from template changes I made and nothing I did seemed to help. I could not get the traffic back.

Toward the end of April in this year (2015), I stumbled across Ezoic. As I explained at the time, I didn't have much confidence that they could do anything useful, but I really had nothing to lose: I was in the cellar and really could go nowhere but up.

And up it has gone. The Semrush chart shows that plainly and ad income has followed suit. Things are nowhere near what they were before 2010, but they are much better than they have been recently.

That's all good. What I DON'T like about Ezoic is the the templates that have accomplished this. I think they are often garish and that ad insertions are far too aggressive. You can control a lot of that with settings at their control panels, but even so automated layouts can never match what a human would do. It can get really ugly.

One particularly galling thing is that their templates see "<a href" as potential insertion points. That's so wrong: that's not a block level tag and inserting an ad ahead of it often breaks up a paragraph. I'm hoping they fix that soon.

But it works. By all metrics, this site is improving: more traffic, more money, more user engagement. I can't argue with that. I don't like the layouts, I cringe when I see how cluttered with ads some pages are, but IT WORKS.

That's what matters and that's why I'll be staying with Ezoic.

I'm going to let Ezoic mess this site up

Ezoic Day 2

Words can kill

Ezoic

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Sometime in the late 1960's, I worked in a carpet mill as an assistant to the General Manager. I don't remember much about my duties, but I do remember the Accounting Manager. Actually, not him so much as his office, which abutted a larger room with twenty or so desks. A window in his office gave him a full view of that room, which would have let him supervise his clerks.

There were no people in that room, though. There was dust on the desks, and on each was a mechanical calculator. These were the type with a hand crank - you'd input your numbers and pull the handle to get printed results. I'd used such machines myself; they made a distinct sound, but now it was all silence. This once noisy Accounting Department had been replaced by outsourcing to a computer somewhere. That transition had happened before I was hired, but not so long ago that the room had been repurposed.

The manager still had one of those calculators on his desk and made daily use of it.

The significance of those empty desks and unused calculators wasn't lost on me. I realized that people had lost jobs and that this was probably happening all over the world. But that wasn't cause for concern: the unemployment rate in the U.S. was well under 4% and was probably even lower in my state. Those people wouldn't have trouble finding jobs and wouldn't even need a college degree.

I had no degree. I don't recall what my job at that mill paid, but I'm sure it wasn't much. Yet I supported my non-working wife and infant daughter on that income. We had to watch our spending, but we survived.

The world sure has changed, hasn't it? My functions at that job have long been replaced by computers, but even if someone had a similar job today, they couldn't support a family. If I could have forseen that, I woud have been very surprised. I knew that computers and robots would be replacing people, but I saw that as a good thing. People would have more leisure time and everything would become less expensive. Eventually no one would work and the cost to manufacture anything would be so close to zero as to not matter.

Naive? Well, yes, but then again what is the alternative? Robotics and AI are replacing humans at an ever accelerating pace. No job is safe - with the exception of politicians, ironically. You can easily see the trend and it doesn't take any great imagination to see where it ends: no available work at all. No waiters, no artists, no poets, no analysts. When? Twenty years, forty, a hundred - whatever number you believe, the end is still in sight and there will just be more misery alomg the way. You, the highly educated skilled worker, will be "safe" as factory jobs dissipate. You'll probably be mildly surprised when you first visit a fast food restaurant that employs no humans, but as you summon a robotic taxi to take you to your next meeting, you'll have already pushed any worries about your own work deep into your subconscious.

Perhaps you will be one of the last. Your human skills and education will still be valuable as unemployment exceeds all previous records. You'll complain about the high taxes necessary to support the masses of "unskilled" people who lack your advanced degrees. You'll demand solutions: educational programs, birth control, maybe even euthanasia.

One of your close friends loses her job, replaced by analytical software. You rationalize that your work is safe because your work requires creativity, but reading about new AI advances in just that area is worrisome. And then one day the reality you never thought could happen comes true. The AI software that has been running the company you work for these past few years has been upgraded and it can now do your job too.

What the hell archy, what the hell?

Vintage Calculators Web Museum

Robots Could Replace Half Of All Jobs In 20 Years

Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil`

More Work Hours? Jeb Bush, Try Talking to the Employers

Archy and Mehitabel

What is the point of work?

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Apparently Walmart thinks it can compete with Amazon and plans to offer a $50 per year membership patterned after Amazon Prime. That's set to happen this year, but details are sketchy. They might include some streaming content along with free delivery, but there will be nothing even close to what Prime customers enjoy.

First up: selection. Walmart apparently sells about a million different items. Amazon has 200 million or more. Walmart competes on low priced items, while Amazon offers a range of price and quality for many items. Walmart customers generally have far less income than Amazon shoppers, so cutting the membership to $50 is likely meaningless. Additionally, Amazon Prime includes much more: Free ebooks, free music and a Netflix like streaming service that also produces its own content. Walmart can't even begin to compete with that.

Of course there is always a market for cheap. Walmart didn't need any of those perks to become the retail behemoth it is. They may capture the low end of the internet market, but I doubt they will ever be serious competition for Amazon.

Walmart to take on Amazon with a Prime-like service of its own

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The other day I had an email from Ziff Davis. Its subject was "Start a Blog with Toolbox for IT!". Ordinarily I would have just trashed that without looking at it, but I accidentally opened it and found it amusing enough to pursue. It started off with the typical schmoozing: "I came across your blog while looking for some insight on technology know-how, and was very impressed with the content you are providing.". Yeah, sure. Please stroke me some more while I sip my coffee.

It went on to say "I am always looking for talented bloggers to join the Toolbox for IT blogging community.". Talented? Well, gosh that sure fits me, doesn't it? I have to read more!

What came next just about knocked me off my chair. It said that if I joined their blogging community, I'd have the opportunity to "earn additional income based on your posts, with $50 per 300-word post (earning up to $500/month for ten posts)". Fifty bucks for 300 words? That's pretty high pay - I figure a 500 word tech post usually takes me about an hour, soup to nuts, so that's about $100 an hour and sometimes more. Not bad for tippity tappety on the keyboard, right? Especially not bad as the going rate for such articles on the rest of the internet is often much, much less. I've seen people offering $2 for 300 word articles - that's extreme, but we are competing with very low income talent, so rates are very low.

Of course they did say "opportunity". So what's the gotcha? I wrote back, expressing my amazement and requesting details. The response was quick and quite definite: "All the conditions are to blog about your field of expertise and meet the 300 word count minimum per post after signing a contract and returning at least a W9 to us."

A contract? Ahh, there's the rub. I asked for details on said contract and was refused: "I am sorry, but I do not have access to a contract. To see the contract, you would need to apply. Once your application is approved, legal would be touch."

Ahh. So I clicked through to apply. I found that in addition to providing the usual personal details, the application required me to submit a blog post. Huh? They expect me to give them a post and THEN tell me the financial details? I wrote back again, pointing out the incongruity of that. Within an hour they sent me a contract which they said was "part of the contract legal would send you".

Part of? So secretive, but I accepted it for what it was and took a look. It started off by explaining that if I gave them content, I was agreeing to give them "an exclusive, unlimited, perpetual U.S. and world-wide license to use, modify, and distribute" what I had submitted. My only rights to the content would be to use it in an "in the form of an e-book or hard copy"; other than that I could not reproduce it anywhere. Harsh, but there is that $50.00, right?

Not so fast. That was covered a bit later. It said "Author shall receive $50 per Qualifying Blog up to a maximum of ten (10) Qualifying Blogs per month." Of course it specified that the Blog must be in English, must be at least 300 words and so on. And then this: "ZD shall determine whether a blog is a Qualifying Blog or not in its sole discretion".

So, if I'm reading that contract right, anything I submit becomes theirs to use but they decide whether it is worth paying for. Curious, I took a look at the site and read a few articles others had submitted. They weren't awful, but it's hard to imagine anyone paying $50 for the ones I read. They weren't anything special, not really very technical and nothing you can't find all over the internet. In other words, the site is a content farm. I doubt they pay for much.

So I wrote back once more, asking if my interpretation was correct. If they decided that my article was not worth paying for, would I be able to withdraw it and use it myself?

So far, no answer to that question.. it's only been two weeks so I'm hoping they'll let me know soon :)

-- This feed and its contents are the property of A.P. Lawrence, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.