[ Thanks to Michael
S. Mimoso for this link. ]
“Sucked in by advertising, Jameson C. Burt bought a proprietary
mathematical software application four years ago. This year, he
discovered that he couldn’t move that program to new hardware
without paying hefty license fees. That’s when Burt realized he’d
made the wrong choice.“The proprietary product in question is MATLAB, a technical
computing environment created by Needham, Mass.-based The
MathWorks. Burt, an IT professional working for a federal agency,
has used MATLAB to test theories about the stock market. He has
downloaded quarterly statistics for 10,000 stocks daily since 1995.
This data conveys a historical view of the stock market during boom
and crash years.“In one of his tests, he wrote a program in MATLAB that created
a minimal algorithm that buys and sells stocks. Surprisingly, the
MATLAB tests of mock purchases and sales showed that treating
purchases and sales asymmetrically improved returns…”