A Day in Paradise

Indices

So Barra stopped updating their historical S&P numbers last November. This leaves me having to update 30+ product deployments which have been cut off from thier benchmark datasource.

I’ll admit it was rather silly to make my application dependant on a single source of information which I didn’t have control over. In hindsight it’s obvious that I should have built my own webservice, which would not be dependant on any one source of information.

I guess we live and learn. Now to find alternative datasources and roll out a new webservice and update those deployments. Like I didn’t have enough to do already.

I’m not sure if anyone has anyone run into this, or has a better solution to this problem. What I’ve been doing is simply saving the document as an HTML and then grabbing the JPG or PNG image.

Is there a correct way to do this?

Google Finance

At first glance google’s new financial portal looks like another catch-up attempt to offer an alternative to a Yahoo! service. However, once you get past the simple front page, the individual stock pages are quite impressive.

Using a mix of Flash and AJAX, Google finance mixes the stock charts with their news service, allowing users to view access news articles and press releases directly from the stock graphs. The Flash interface also gives makes it very easy to select a time window to examine.

Company and management information are also presented as well as a summary of blog posts related to the company and timeframe. Unfortunatly, it seems that they only have hourly from the 14th of this march. Other than that it certainly ranks up there with Fool.com and Yahoo Finance as a great financial reference source. Interestingly Google hasn’t updated their stock search to include Google Finance.

Stats: R-squared

Dear Professor Mean, On my TI-83, when calculating quadratic regression, there is a number that is found called R-squared (R^2). I understand that this is the coefficient of determination. But….I thought that R^2 had to do with linear models. What is R^2 finding for this quadratic regression? what does this number mean? is there a way to find R^2 through a “pencil and paper” process?? I know the equation for R^2 for a linear regression. But its the quadratic I need to know about. please, anyone, help!!