Predict the Markets!
When you make an investing decision, you are implicitly predicting the future and your predictions / beliefs are shown in your investing choices - if you buy then you expect it to go up and vice versa, assuming you are rational. But curiously "prediction" is a word all but abandoned by finance professionals - you can build "pricing models" or "trading systems" or even make "forecasts" of say, volatility ... but "prediction" is verboten, not used in polite conversation.
The "scandal of prediction" is a phrase coined by some famous market bigwig who's probably sold millions of books and who doesn't need any endorsement from me - but it is a very good phrase and it does embody how "dirty" and nasty the word "prediction" is when used in the financial world; basically when someone says they can "predict the markets" they are almost certainly utter charlatans, and if they aren't, so goes the logic, why would they be advertising it, selling it to others, why not just get rich themselves, start a hedge fund etc ... semi-intelligent people thus run a mile when they see such adverts ... while the poor gullible herd get scammed; chances are, it's a Ponzi.
Marketing StockWave has proved to be difficult for us - despite the amount written on it, people still want the sound-bite, my explanations are necessarily littered with technical jargon, words from science and engineering, full of caveats and nuance ... but then the audience start turning off; sometimes one might say to me -
"wait a minute - so your software can predict the stock market"?!
- the scientist in me feels unease, but the marketing man wants to open up with all the bullshit
... sort of ... in a way ...
- what do you mean, it does or it doesnt? ... (- simple people do love the "law of the excluded middle")
... eh ...urgh ....
OK, so I was never cut out to be a salesman.
One problem with saying "prediction" is that people immediately think of binary, true/false absolute knowledge - they think of the future price trajectory of a stock in crisp, exact detail - this is not possible to obtain, this is something only god knows - BUT - StockWave produces probabilistic predictions, i.e. the "true odds" of future price movements AND with the "true odds" you can then work out how to bet (- "make investing decisions") - which is all you NEED.
For example, as a trader you don't need to know the exact future price trajectory, all you need to do is to be ON THE RIGHT SIDE of the trade when you come to close it out - if I buy stock, then as long as it has gone up when I come to exit, I really don't care what the chart looked like inbetween - I made money, that was my objective. If I can make these kind of up, down or sideways decisions better than random chance, then I can make real money. So how could I get such a trading edge? Well, you could try getting some software which was a bit better, had a lot more behind it, than the usual TA charting packages ...
StockWave can use all relevant data, data from different source types - prices and news and fundamentals, and it contains the best selection of computational / machine-learning algorithms, some of which are novel, invented by us, and the rest, heavily customised for our application. It is unique, nothing even close to it exists.