Jeremy J. Bourne, CFA

Right Decision, Wrong Outcome

We make decisions every day throughout the course of our lives, many of which we ask ourselves after-the-fact:

Save Time through Simple Automation

Automation - the biggest disrupter of the decade…

Transitioning my Career to Data Science & Analytics

This month marks two years since I made a major career pivot into the world of Data Science and Analytics. In my past life, I was working with the Investment Management group at a well respected private bank doing investment research and traditional, fundamental portfolio/risk management analysis… And it was awesome! I loved the people, the stimulating conversations, the forecasting and predicting of investment returns… the list goes on. But I knew there was a quickly developing field that would one day become an integral component of any analytical job. And that field required a lot of technical expertise, (particularly programming) which was an area in which I was lacking. So I took a leap of faith.

Using Predictive Analytics to Manage Diabetes

I’ve been a Type I diabetic since I was 11 years old. Over the course of the last several years, I have been using Continuous Glucose Monitoring technology to measure and track my blood glucose levels. For those of you who may not be familiar with the management of Type I Diabetes, because of a genetic condition that I was pre-disposed to as child, my pancreas cannot regulate the level of sugar in my blood like that of a normal healthy individual.

K-Medoid Cluster Analysis on Equity Securities

If you’ve had the opportunity to study finance, even in the most basic college courses you learn that the value of an asset is derived in part by the opportunity costs of readily available alternatives. For instance, the value of a high dividend paying equity security decreases when interest rates increase. There exists this inverse relationship because a rational investor won’t have the willingness to hold the risk of an equity security if a less-risky alternative (like fixed income) is able to provide a reasonable return. These cashflow producing assets, in the marketplace, are “competing” for the same investor capital. If there is an interest rates increase, on a relaive basis, dividend paying equities become less attractive and the price subsequently decreases.

Downloading Historical Security Prices

I’ve spent years honing my economic acumen and valuation modeling techniques, but what good are those skills if I don’t have an easy and efficient way to access the large volume of data needed to run meaningful analysis? I’m going to teach you a method to overcome one of he biggest hurdles to getting started: Actually getting the data to conduct research. I developed a system to automate this process by creating a function that utilizing the tseries package in R to cache historical security prices onto my local drive, which effectively “stages” the data in order to run the actual analysis.