Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Arbitrage Opportunity

One stock I've been following had just announced a secondary public offering of stock recently. They'd been trading at $65 in the morning and the offering would be at $62 on Friday. Within an hour the price had dropped to $63 by the time I noticed.

I am a fan of the company and invested in this company at a good price, unfortunately the price won't be going up for the next few days so I've dumped my position and taken a short to take advantage of this arbitrage opportunity. Come Friday, the price of this stock should be at $62 at which my limit buy will kick in to turn my position around.

Within 15 minutes of taking the short position, the price has already dropped below the $63 I shorted it at. I've already setup a stop limit at $63 and a buy at $62 to make a tidy profit, it'll be interesting to see how things go.

Building an Application is a Hard Problem

I've been interested in application design recently. I used to always crunch data using code and then spit it out in some excel friendly format, but I've come to the appreciation of the amount of data organization that is possible by using an application.

But the question is how does one organize data and what is the best way to display it? This is also not a trivial problem either as it takes a considerable amount of time to make the data interface interactive, meaning when you click on something somewhere, you will need to fill fields with whatever you selected. Then throwing left vs right click, multiple selections and menu based selections and things can get very busy very fast.

I've started to understand the use of using a database and using queries to get information out, then on top of that once can use data models to make data manipulation more native to the language that one programs in.

How to make a good application design is a tricky question, since I cannot fully imagine how I would want to manipulate / interact with the data just yet because the user's relationship with the data is defined by the interface.

I've been interested in building stock pricing models recently and have been building a database of stock instruments and data. Sure it would be ok to spend a considerable amount of time to create an interface to do something, but I am quite not sure if what I would be doing is the right thing just yet and programming with that kind of fear is simply not productive.

For now, I'll be more than happy to stick with excel to figure out how I really want to interact with my data first.