Whither now? Having got my basic trading system in place I now need to work on the details. I need to actually put together a dataframe (table) with a bunch of returns from several different sources (crypto index, spy, nasdaq, other) all lined up by date. Not difficult, but rather boring. And since my current level of trading is low, and my profits likely to be in the range of a few dollars, motivation is not high. I will get it done but I need to be in the mood for getting boring stuff done, and that doesn’t happen very often. I’m not a details person, which is probably why I suck at languages, art, music, etc.
So I was browsing in my local cheese shop online bookstore and found an interesting looking book on the subject of Reinforcement Learning. I’m trying to stick with PyTorch and am avoiding books that use TensorFlow for code examples, so I went to the GitHub site the authors gave for code access. Lo and behold they eschew all those libraries and basically roll their own. Interesting. One thing I really want to do is improve my mastery of Python as a language, and this seems a good opportunity to do that. It’s great that I can check out what they’re doing in code through GitHub, almost makes up for the inability to actually browse through a shelf of books in a real bookstore like I used to be able to do. Those were the days.
Anyway, Amazon provides a sample to look at before purchase (how I found the GitHub site) and in the introduction they did say one needs a good undergraduate level in probability to follow this book. Probability, not my forte. However, one of the books I have acquired over the years (but not actually read) is Probability for Machine Learning by Jason Brownlee of machinelearningmastery.com. So, as the title says, one thing leads to another.
My main aim is to keep my mind occupied in my doting years. At this stage the trading is just an excuse. I’ve lost too much money in the past through trading that I’ll only risk that again if BTC goes up enough that I have money to burn. At this stage that’s looking pretty unlikely. Even buying a small apartment to mitigate the rental crisis problem here is looking problematic. No matter. I’ll keep those grey cells humming with a good book on probability.