Specialist Angler - the one with my first article in it

I have now reached Specialist Angler in my fishing magazine sort out and the memorable issue number 27 from Spring / Summer 1996 which includes my first fishing article, Small River, Summer Barbel. So it was with some delight that I was able to re-read my learned thoughts on this important, but sadly neglected subject.

My angling activities peaked in 1995 as 1996 was the year of the Hanson demerger and I was stuck working 15 hour days for that year, being too tired to even contemplate fishing at the weekends. Indeed 1997 and 1998 were not much better and it was not until the 1999 / 2000 season that I started to have enough time to do a few trips. My article recounts a summer barbelling on the Windrush at Ducklington, a river I haven't fished for years now, but which I am thinking about for this summer. Rumour has it that the river has been desimated by the re-introduction of otters. But I will give it a go I think.

The memorable issue for Spring / Summer 1996.

There I am in the company of Peter Stone (who I once went fishing with on the Windrush after meeting him at a Newlands AGM), Mark Vial (who died while fishing I believe), Stewart Allum (famous chub angler) . . .

What words of wisdom! And a photo of me fishing taken by daughter one Saturday morning when she was six.

Page 2, and an illustration using a 7lb barbel. Note the Seer Rod in the photo - my "specialist rover" built by Andy and Jill Orme.

And this is a good excuse for another Jill Orme picture - this time she seems be be Jill Butterworth. That is an amazing pike she's caught. My best is about half that size.

32lbs from Loch Lomond - brilliant

Bow Wow Wow are playing in Oxford!

Another name from the distant past - Bow Wow Wow - has appeared in an advert for live shows, one of which is at the O2 in Oxford. I was a big fan of BWW in the very early 1980s. I loved the "Burundi beat" drumming and Annabella was a great singer. Of course the band were swampeed in controversy from the world go, due to the rather racy lyrics and their first album cover based on Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, all when Annabella was only 14/15.

This rather detracted from the fact that she was actually a really good singer.

I have no idea what she has been up to since BWW split, but had hoped at one time that she would develop into a singer like Neneh Cherry. And I'm not convinced that I would like to see a live show now. I did see them once in London in about 1982 and they were very good. Annabella had two dancers with her and they were very impressive together. But it would be pretty odd to see BWW now, when Annabella is in her 40s, particularly since most of their best songs did rather play on her under-age status. For instance, a song like Louis Quatorze would be very odd.

Still, she did have a great voice, so I would like to think that her shows would go well.


Annabella and dancers - a 1982 live show in the USA

The controversial cover (as Annabella is 14) - BWW's Dejeuner sur L'herbe (Manet's Lunch on the grass - below)

Very much the look I remember from the live show I saw

Fishing Magazines - Practical Course Fishing - the issue with me in it

My sorting out of fishing magazines has reached Practical Course Fishing, one of my all-time favourite fishing magazines, but one that only made it through about a dozen issues, from October 1993 to November 1994, before being "merged" (was subsumed) with the nowhere-near-as-good Improve Your Course Fishing (which, ironically, is still going strong)

The June 1994 issue was the highlight as it is the one that features me fishing with Tony Miles on the Hale Park Syndicate water on the Hampshire Avon. I had joined this syndicate after an advert appeared in Waterlog, but only fished it half a dozen times. It was a tough venue, but with a very large average size of fish. My personal best chub at the time, of 5-07 was caught there.

So it is early one Sunday morning in March 1994. I had travelled down from London on the Saturday evening and was parked at Hale bridge. As I emerged pre dawn, it turned out that Tony was in the van next to me. We had first met back in the late 1970s when I was chub fishing on one of my local rivers, the Leam. And I'd bumped into him again a year or two later, on either the Warwickshire Avon or the Upper Ouse. But we were not particularly friends or anything.

But we had a good chat first thing that morning. Tony effectively quzzing me on all I knew about the stretch (not much). Then we set off in different directions, passing one another at various times through the day. For me it was a tough day, one bite, no fish. Tony apparently had a couple later on that night after I had set off home.

At one point, towards the end of the article, he asks me to get in touch as I had left some tackle behind. This was untrue - he just wanted to get in touch more generally. We corresponded for the next year or so, and arranged a couple of fishing trips together, but my work commitments stopped these happening. After the 1995 season, when I fished more than I have ever done since, 1996 was the year of huge work changes and I hardly fished at all. In fact, it was not for a few years that I managed a season with more than a dozen trips - so we lost touch.

Maybe I will drop him a line - my magazine sort out has revealed a load of his very early articles that I remember well from Angling magazine.

Tony's article, with a background shot of me fishing the right bank below Hale Bridge on the Hampshire Avon - trotting bread flake using a centre pin.

The paragraphs that I feature in are in the right hand column

I remember Tony saying when we first started fishing that day that if I caught something decent, could I retain it for a photo for the article. Sadly I didn't!

My main fishing club has an arrangement with Hale Park that we can fish down there, so I have a tentative plan to have a two day trip in March this year, 18 years after the trip that immortalised me in the angling press!

Fishing Magazines - Waterlog

My hunting through the boxes of fishing magazines has caused me to stumble upon a stack of copies of Waterlog, the Chris Yates magazine. This really is a quite extraordinary fishing magazine when compared to the typical technique-based regular fishing magazine. I have sorted through perhaps 30 copies, selecting three or four articles from each. I was particularly pleased to note the focus on Bernard Venables up to his death.

In one instance, a letter writer noted that he found the magazine to be founded on mis-information, and a total disregard for sound fishing practices. As a result, he would of course be renewing his subscription.

A hunt on the internet reveals that Waterlog is still published but on a subscription only basis - I am seriously considering subscribing.

Whatever happened to Jill Orme?

Somewhere, I once read that fishing magazines are more than 99% bought by men - and the other tiny percent is when women are buying copies for men! And it has to be said that very few women feature in Course fishing magazines - when they do it is usually in an advert. Indeed, having been reading many fishing magazines from as long ago as 1976, I have to say that much of the advertising is very sexist, though I did like one advert that features a scantily clad wife greating her husband home. He has his hands behind his back like he is holding a present for her, but he is actually holding a bottle of bait flavour. The caption reads - "and all because the lady loves squid and octopus"

One way that females that fish do feature in fishing magazines is when their husband is writing an article and decides to illustrate his catches with pictures of his wife. This started as long ago as the late 70s with John Bailey's wife Sharon, but reached its peak in the early 1990s with a number of articles by Andy Orme featuring his rather gorgeous wife, Jill. In part this was probably to help advertise their rod making business, Seer rods

I met Jill and Andy at some sort of angling show (one of the specimen hunter shows) and bought one of their rods - the specialist rover. This is an absolutely superb rod and is the one that I use for almost all my fishing on the Windrush and Evenlode. I even had an evening on the stretch of the River Teme that they managed (Haven fishery near Bromyard), catching a rather nice 7lb barbel on rolled cheese paste.

My sorting out of fishing magazines has reached Course Fishing Today, where most of Andy Orme's articles appeared. And there is Jill, looking totally gorgeous with various fish. Indeed, the pictures below feature Jill with my favourite fish - barbel, chub and pike. At times I have wondered what it must be like to share one's life with a real soul mate - someone you can talk to about bolt rigs for small river barbel, pre-baiting strategies for boilies, strategies for low and clear rivers in the summer - the things that really matter. I can't help thinking that Jill would have had many interesting views on such subjects.

Seer Rods appears to be no more. A post on an angling website said that Jill and Andy split up and that Andy runs a big game fishing boat in Kenya. I was pondering the other day on buying a new fishing rod - perhaps an 11 - 12ft, 1.5lb test curve rod for big barbel to medium carp. Sadly it will not be a Seer Rod it would seem.

Jill and I are the same age but she is (was?) a much better angler than me!

Jill Orme with barbel - perhaps my favourite Jill picture.

Cover girl Jill with another barbel.

Mighty meat indeed - Jill with chub

An early, possibly pre-Andy picture. Jill with pike. Has there ever been a more attractive wearer of waders?

First amazing music track of 2012 - Varttina's Miss'on Miun Armahin

Another random find on a download entitled "Finnish folk music" - the band Varttina. They started as a trad folk band in the late 1970s releasing several albums of finnish music. I have worked my way through the first few so far and the track Miss'on Miun Armahin ("Wherre is my beloved?") is stupendously good I reckon.

Sadly, they seem to have become something of a "euro-pop" band in the 1980s and are still going strong in that guise it would seem. Not my cup of tea at all. Still, one stupendous track is well worth it. You don't get that from everyone

Freakzone downloads

For many years I have wondered where obscure and unusual music might appear on the radio, following the death of John Peel (still sadly missed by me). There are the shows on the internet associated with The Wire Magazine, but now I have located a possible, post-Peel show, Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone (and another of his shows, Freakier Zone).

Some recordings of these have appeared on a download site I use and seem to offer an excellent mix of stuff. The first I've listened to had a great track by John Renbourn (of Pentangle) from his album The Nine Maidens followed by Mellow Candle's Reverend Sisters from the classic Swaddling Songs album. Other downloads include tracks by Ash Ra Tempel, Nico, The Nice, Spirit, Chris and Cosey, even Stuart Dempster (whose trombone pieces recorded in a huge, concrete, underground bunker remains a firm favourite of mine)

So maybe that if something to dip into, even though I have just 16 examples of the show.

Or there is Ondaru Radio, a strange internet radio station that may be based in Russia, and mainly plays modern classical stuff.

Boxes of Old Fishing Magazines

A quick look through the garage here and at my mum's has produced 6 large boxes of fishing magazines. While I do the trading for the next few days I am planning to work my was through these, keeping a selection of articles and organising them in some way. For the moment there are a number of huge piles of magazines in the study.

The first fishing magazines I bought were Course fisherman and Angling, starting around 1975. The latter only lasted a few more years, while CF staggered on until just a few years ago I think. In CF, I really loved the articles by Brian Morland, but he seemed to stop writing by around 1980. Am I right in thinking that he was involved in some sort of scandal related to the chapter of a large barbel that may have been during the close season? CF also had the rather bizarre Chris Binyon, pike angler and overall reprobate. Angling had the first articles I ever read by Tony Miles - two articles on summer and winter chub fishing.

One article that I had forgotten about in CF was an interview with Ray Webb. He had co-authored one of my first fishing books, Fishing for Big Pike, which my parents bought me for Christmas in 1975 or 76. He had famously quit work to fish full time, but had then been afflicted by a series of mental problems, resulting in his hospitalisation, which is where the interview took place. Harrowing stuff.

Other piles include the eccentric Waterlog, lots of different fly fishing magazines, early issues of Improve your Course Fishing, my current favourite, Course Angling Today (going back to 2005) and the excellent Practical Course Fishing, perhaps my all time favourite, as one issue featured me fishing the Hampshire Avon with Tony Miles. And then there are loads of magazines that seemed to only survive a short time, like Course Fishing Monthly. But I do have about twenty issues of Specialist Angler - whatever happened to the National Association of Specialist Anglers (or NASA as it was confusingly called)? I even seem to have some copies of Barbel Fisher - are they still going?

Post Christmas Calm

So Christmas has come and gone again and a calm descends on the house. Things started to warm up a week before Christmas when Linda's parents arrived. Luckily I was on trading duty full time as Jerome had his kids before Christmas this year, so I had an excuse to avoid too much interaction with them. By Thursday even Linda was beginning to get a bit fed up with the "inane banter"

By Thursday I had finished work and Linda and I were deep in food buying. I went to Tescos at 6:00am to buy bulk stuff, then we both went to Oxford to collect our turkey and duck, plus a huge amount of other things. As usual, the breakfast at Brothers was a calm half hour in the chaos.

Daughter came home on Friday afternoon, rather the worse for wear after a night out on Thursday. She soon settled in for some serious lying around, napping and watching Frozen Planet on TV. I picked up my mum on the Saturday. She seems to get on ok with Linda's parents, but even she thought they were whining rather a lot about things.

Christmas day cooking was a triumph for Linda as always. Duck for the first time - and very nice too. No board games this year for some reason. Present opening continued into the late afternoon. My chief presents were an A3 photo printer and the latest version of Photoshop, plus a couple of excellent books (Westman's The Copernican Question, Heilbron's biography of Galileo, a book on writing history and the Houellebecq / Levy philosophical argument, Public Enemies).

Boxing Day was spent at Linda's brother's. Lots more food, some football watching, and so on. Linda's parents set off the same time as us and arrived two hours after us. At one point we thought they might have gone home instead.

My mum returned home the next day and seems to have had a nice time. last year she didn't see many people in January and so this year I ought to try and make sure I see her a bit more regularly when she doesn't have her friends coming round.

And so the calm eventually descends. Just the three of us for a couple of days before Daughter returns to London on Friday. Lots of reading, tv watching, more nice meals . . . .

Continuing reading about WWII

I have continued my recent phase of reading histories of World War 2. I am actually quite shocked about how much of it has been new to me. My most recent reading is Max Hastings' Armaggeddon, focused on the last 12 months of the war in Europe. I am surprised by how critical he is of the British and American soldiers in comparison with either the Germans or the Russians. he feels they weren't sufficiently motivated for war as the others were. Also, he feels sure that the Allied commanders would not have accepted the casualty levels that the others would.

Before that I read Rees' Auschwitz, which accompanies his TV series from a couple of years ago, which we have on DVD but which I haven't brought myself to watch yet. I remember years ago seeing the World at War episode about this and haven't watched anything like it since. One of the people featured by Rees cared for her younger sister at the camp, but was seperated just after the liberation when her sister was taken to a hospital. She never saw her again and only found out years later that the sister had died a few days later at the hospital.

What I have been watching is a joint German/Russian documentary series on Stalingrad, which really does emphasise the hardships faced in this battle. After the war, the Russians retained many Germans as prisoners for a number of years. Most were released in the 1950s and there was some film of Germans waiting at stations for the trains to arrive that might have their relatives on them. Of course for everyone who located a relative, there were dozens that went away devasted with disappointment after all that time.

First fishing trip for ages

I am currently having a big throw out of old magazines and this week's theme has been fishing magazines - mainly fairly recent issues of Course Fishing Today (I haven't managed to find the boxes of older magazines which must be lurking in the garage somewhere). The weather forecast is quite poor for the next few days and I was inspired to try and sneak in a trip before the weather got much worse.

The chosen venue was a local stretch of the Evenlode. No time to make bait, so I am forced into buying some at the fishing tackle shop in Witney. As I parked near the farm, I was approached by a guy who I thought might be going to ask me to leave, but it turned out that he was just curious who I was, having not seen many members of the club on this stretch in the two years he has lived there.

The river looked really bad - I have never seen it so low. I would guess it was two foot below the lowest level I have ever seen it before. This could be a problem as some of the spots I planned to fish were now effectively shallows. I decide on a relatively static approach, baiting up a longish, reasonably deep run where I have had a few nice fish in the past. But it is not a great afternoon and I manage just one fish, a chub of about 2lbs.

Maybe the rain we are due will perk it up a bit and I can have another trip over Christmas.

Hawkwind show in London

Off to London to see Hawkwind's traditional Christmas show (they were not playing Oxford this year). We are supposed to have met Daughter late afternoon for an early supper, but it was her work's Christmas party last night and she was still rather hungover!

So we dine alone in Covent Garden and then arrive at the O2 (as it is now called) in Shepherd's Bush just as Hawkwind are coming on stage. It is absolutely jam packed and we eventually settle in a spot about two-thirds back and over to the left. Linda has a tall, bald guy in his fifties in front of her who proves to be an enthusiatic dancer.

I had sort of expected a show very similar to last year, but it is actually quite a different set. They are still playing Prometheus from last year's CD, but tonight also played a stupendous version of (I think) Hassan I Sahba and (much to our surprise) Silver Machine!

And they have two new dancers, doing roughly the same routines as last year, but with less stilts involved.

We drive home listening to disc one of Space Ritual and already plan to see their next shows, set for the spring. Excellent stuff

Magic Trip

This summer, during our Italian break, I re-read On the Bus, a photo-journalist, oral history of the "legendary" Ken Kesey bus trip immortalised in Tom Wolfe's Electric Cool Aid Acid Test. And this week a movie has appeared, Magic Trip, based on the digital remastering of the original footage and a considerable amount of "post-production" work to tidy it up. An essential DVD purchase I feel.

Much to my surprise, Linda is prepared to watch it with me, so this becomes our Sunday night viewing. This is exactly my sort of thing. Proto-hippies driving around, having "far out" experiences fuelled by excessive consumption of the then-legal LSD. Wild music from the earliest version of The Grateful Dead (Garcia without a beard, Pigpen on vocals). None of the responsibilities of normal life - yes, very much my thing, and just as congruent to my values today as when I first read the Tom Wolfe book around 30 years ago.

I suspect Linda hated it

A foodie weekend with daughter

Daughter is low on cash and has therefore come home for the weekend, with a clear intention of getting as much subsidy for things as possible - i.e. not having to pay for food, but having nice meals, maybe not paying for her haircut, and so on. So she is home Friday after work. Our first night consists of an Indian meal and watching The Thing.

Saturday she has a 3 or 4 hour appointment at a hairdressers in Abingdon and succeeds in persuading me to contribute. And our meal that night is a 3-course extravaganza - scallops and prawns in a cream and paprika source, followed by fillet steak with a port and red wine jus, and a surprise for dessert - strawberry knickerbocker glory in the style of the pub we like near her flat in London that no longer does them. All accompanied by our last bottle of Lagrazette Cahor red wine.

Sunday is Browns in Oxford for lunch prior to her journey home. Total cost for the weekend - something like £250 to £300.

No more trading innovations . . .

Having spent a couple of days on a new research project, I have had a change of plan. Instead of looking for another market that trades in a way that is uncorrelated with what we currently do, I think it might be better to have no new markets, or other major changes to our current trading for the time being. Too often we have been distracted from the consistent application of a method we have extensively researched, have pursued something else that initially looked good, only to find that it under performed our original systems in the subsequent period. Instead, I am planning to focus on issues of position sizing and estimates of the so-called "Kelly fraction". Also I will be re-reading the literature on fractional Kelly methods, starting with the complex Thorp paper I read a year or so ago.

So my current plan for the trading is that we will trade as we are now till the new year, then increase leverage by 50% by end of Feb, then assess again.

Yet I do have one other research project that I would like to look at! Most market traders use data that is structured in a way that is a factor of one hour - that, afterall, is why an hour is split into 60 minutes, as 60 factors by 2,3,4,5,6,10, 12, 15, 20 and 30. But most of these time periods results in trading decisions being based on the data at the hour or half hour mark. My thought is that it might be better to be on a time stamp that is not one of these times. For instance, a 29 minute period would hardly ever line up with the other time stamps. If we traded our two markets with different, "unusual" time stamps, it would also be easier to do the trading as well as only one market would require calculations at a time. It might even be possible to trade several different programmes in each market if they were all on different time stamps.

But our charting package doesn't allow back testing of this idea so I am having to look at it in real time. Early data is quite promising, (as it so often is) but it will be several weeks before I have any real results.

Another research project - the Bund

Thanksgiving Day, so no trading in one of our main markets, but enough vol in the others to make it just about worthwhile to trade. With the latest tiny tweak to our systems, the actual management of trades has really improved, so there isn't the rather frantic, closely-spaced activity that used to characterise our trading throughout the day. This suggests that we have time in our daily routine to add another major market sector - usually I look at Crude Oil for this, but this time I have decided to look at the German Bund again, if only because it is in the news today following a failure of a 10 year auction this week.

And the initial prognosis is very good. True I have only processed about a dozen days of trades, but high Sharpe ratio systems don't need much data. By Sunday I'll have about 50 days which should be enough. Jerome is already talking of adding the Bund from next Monday! Average daily profit is 27 pts but volatility is low at 52 pts for a Sharpe ratio of 8.3. Adding this to our current portfolio and setting a position size via the relative Vol (rather than correlation at this stage), and daily profit is up 50% while daily vol at the portfolio level is only up 10%. Now that is a major positive!

The Bund Dec 2011 contract - could this produce another huge jump in our Sharpe Ratio?

Videos of The Acid Mothers Temple in Oxford

When I was at the Acid Mothers Temple show the other day, there was a guy standing to my right leaning against the wall and with quite a fancy camera set up. On a single pole, he had an SLR camera, a small digital camera and what looked like a microphone or possible another camera of some sort.

And in the last couple of days, two videos have appeared on Youtube which were clearly taken by him. I have to say, they are extremely good. I have a programme called "youtube downloader" so I can copy videos to my PC and have really enjoyed the 30 minutes he has made available so far. Hope the rest of the shows eventually appears.

Part 1 - the first 30 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/?v=jMTjxXIywm4&feature=related

Part 2 - Pink Lady Lemonade

http://www.youtube.com/?v=qZdvvZ4iPhI

I am standing about 5 yards to the tapers left, directly in front of the ultra-cool guitar-synth player.

Yet more amazing music - Grouper

The current issue of Wire Magazine (how often do I write that?) has a feature on someone called Liz Harris, who performs via her solo project, Grouper. The article isn't very clear what her music actually sounds like, but it is intriging enough to spark my interest. It is my monthly renewal date with emusic.com, and basically all her releases are available for download, so I now have A I A: Alien Observer and Dream loss, Dragging a Dead Deer up a Hill, Cover the Windows and the Walls, two singles and a shared CD with Inca Ore

Once again, a truly amazing artist. Similar in some ways to the Hildur Gudnadottir music that I have been listening to for the past month or so, but this time a guitar plus effects, rather than a cello. But the overall sound is very similar - lo-fi, sludgy noise, etc. I am completely captivated by it.

Lots of live clips on Youtube - I am really taken by one clip called "Grouper - Untitled (live in Seoul)"

Liz Harris as Grouper - amazing music

Post-data-bash work

The data bash took me about 10 hours a day, 7 days a week for 3 months to complete, and with its completion, I suddenly have quite a lot of time free. My initial reading has been Francois L'Habitant's Hedge Funds - Quantatative Insights, which was ok, but didn't give me much incremental knowledge. Next up has been Andrew Lo's Hedge Funds - An Analytic Perspective. This is actually quite interesting - especially the chapter on the replication of hedge fund performance by principal factor analysis. Also the chapter on August 2007 is very good.

Next up will be a new book - Emanual Derman's Models Behaving Badly. I am actually really excited about this book, only recently bought and due to arrive tomorrow.

Then other books lurking on the horizon include re-reading Taleb's Fooled by Randomness and (possibly) The Black Swan. Then also re-reading Narang's Inside the Black Box.

Finally I need to look again at the various articles I have on the Kelly Criterion. I am slowly building a position sizing model which incorporates a projection model for the next two years. If we carry on as we have been doing, we will be very happy with the result!!

Kidney Stones??

I am woken, early Sunday morning, with a pain in my right flank - the area above my hips but below my waist. I think it might be kidney related pain, perhaps due to dehydration after having had a few drinks last night. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain is about 1-2.

But half an hour or so later, things have taken a marked change. The pain level is excruciating, maybe a 6-7. Indeed I can't remember the last time I had such a pain. Then, in the space of 5 minutes, it disappears completely.

I am reminded of a former work colleague from years ago, who had a similar experience at work one time, also over in 3-45 mins. A quick look on Wikipedia suggests that a kidney stone would be the perfect explanation for location, intensity and duration.

The pain is gone completely now and I am not sure what I should do next. In the short term, I am following some advice on the website and am drinking more - with bitter lemon replacing coke. Perhaps if it happens again I will consider seeing the doctor - which would be my first trip to our doctor in 15 years.

The new Kate Bush CD

The new Kate Bush album - 50 Words for Snow - is out unofficially on the internet and given the reviews in today's paper, I have succumbed to temptation and downloaded it. I should also note that I have bought a copy as well, due to arrive on Monday.

I have now had a chance to hear it through twice and it is a quite extraordinary record. But if you were to write down what it is about, as if you were pitching an idea to a record company, it would sound totally absurd. That is the genius of Kate Bush - to take these ideas and turn them into something astonishing. And astonishing is definitely the word for it.

I suspect I will be listening to this record repeatedly over the coming weeks (along side the Acid Mothers Temple, of course!)

Is this the cd cover? Not sure yet

Cool hats!

Acid Mothers Temple play a show in Oxford!!!

In Blackwells with Daughter on Sunday I happened to see an advert for an Oxford show by the Acid Mothers Temple. Now there is something I had never expected to happen. I am able to get a ticket online and so it is off to a pub in Jerico to see one of my all time favourite bands. Some searching through the study and I discover that I actually have, in one format or another, over 60 AMT recordings.

When I arrived, the band were actually all sitting at the back of the room upstairs at a small merchandising table, signing copies of their latest CD, The Ripper at the heavens Gates of Dark. What an off bunch they are. You don't really think of their being Japanese hippies in their fifties, but there most definitely are!

They set up their equipment themselves on a tiny stage about the same size as the one in our village hall, then it is off into two hours of psychedelic guitar freakery. Perhaps surprisingly, they play two tracks I know - La Novia and Lady Pink lemonade. Stependous stuff all round and well appreciated by the 400 or so people there.

A guy to my right was videoing or recording the show. I shall be on various download websites in the next week or two to see if I can find this.

Japanese hippies - yeah!

How the Acid Mothers Temple appeared when I first came across them - a huge hippie tribe!

Bert Jansch and Pentangle

I have been slowly reading through piles of press cuttings while doing the trading and have just come across the many obituaries of Bert Jansch. So today has been an intensive listening day to the early Bert Jansch albums I have and to Pentangle, who I have a couple of albums of, but which I have never really listened to seriously. I must say, I have enjoyed Pentangle much more than ever in the past - somehow I just didn't give them the serious listen they deserved. Of particular note was the album Cruel Sister, the title track of which has become a firm favourite today.

Pentangle - an early picture and a recent one from a show in london a year or two ago

The VIX - a new research programme

The data bash is finished and the main statistical analysis is now done - all that remains is to write up the results. Then I will be studying portfolio management and position sizing, with the aim of letting leverage rise to perhaps 3 x the current level, with my exposure representing 75% of the days P/L.

In the meantime, I have been thinking about one category of trades that we always seem to come back to - what we refer to as "Taleb trades", trades deliberately set up with the aim of "bleeding" a small amount each day in return for an occasional huge win. This has lead me back to the VIX, the S&P Volatility Index, or the "Fear Index" as it is often referred as in the recent Robert Harris book

When the VIX is examined intra-day, it is a pretty unusual market. A typical current reading is around the 30 level, but a typical day's range can be 6-8 full points, or about 25% of the value of the index. And it has large discontinuities between the close of one day and the open of the next. My first look at trading this was based on applying out intra-day systems to daily VIX data. This was hugely profitable over the period initially tested - Oct 15 to Nov 5 - making around 1500 pts or over 50% unleveraged. However it was also hugely volatile. A whipsaw could cost 400 pts. You could be long at the close and the next day the market could open up 500 or down 500. So the mark to market was very volatile.

So despite a return of 50% in three weeks, the Sharpe ratio is only about 4.0, which is low compared to our current trading. I did try considering just the long trades, but while that did improve the Sharpe ratio a little, it was still not good enough. Maybe I will be led back to intra-day trading?

A typical one week VIX, with a high of 21 and a low of 17, with large discontinuities between close and the next opening.

Also there is a more subtle problem, which is the high correlation between the VIX trading and our trading of US equities - in other words, we already do well on the sorts of days that cause the VIX to rise or fall lots.

Finally, short term trading of the VIX is not really a "Taleb trade" at all. Maybe we should be looking at VIX options, maybe buying 30 calls whenever the VIX falls below 25, or buying the future when it is below 25 and selling it when it goes above 35.

So for the moment, I shall be looking elsewhere for a possible Taleb Trade

Julian Cope's Krautrock book

I have been dipping into Julian Cope's book, Krautrocksampler over the last couople of days, following the long article in the current issue of Wire Magazine on Manuel Gottsching and the creation of the album "E2-E4". Cope is such an enthusiast! By the end of 50 pages, I am digging through my CDs for Amon Duul II's Yeti, Can's Tago Mago, a couple of CDs of early Ash Ra Tempel and the first Neu record.

I have also found my copy of Cope's equivalent book, Japrocksampler. A current version of this might cover my favourite band, Boris, but the book actually focuses on earlier bands I've never heard of. But this is always the problem - reading Wire, or books like Cope's just set me off again on a wild chase for obscure music.

And that reminds me, I was much surprised to discover that Japanese Psychedelic band, The Acid Mothers Temple, are playing in Oxford this week. I have acquired a ticket and will be among the chosen few at the tiny Jerico Tavern on Wednesday. The current tour has been featuring the epic 30 minute freak out that is Pink Lady Lemonade - hope that play that one when I see them.


Amon Duul II Cds

Can's magnificent Tago Mago, due out again soon in a new edition

Ash Ra Tempel - Manuel Gottsching on the left below

Neu - also very cool. I remember hearing John Peel play Hallogallo years ago. Excellent stuff.

Daughter home for the weekend

For the first time in a while, daughter is home for a weekend visit. Picked up from Didcot after work on Friday and just time for a quick change before we head off for the pub in the village. As usual, Emma has lots of pending things going on in her life, but things generally seem to be going well. Her new-found non-vegentarianism continues to develop, and tonight she has a beef burger for perhaps the first time ever.

She has a lie in on Saturday till mid morning and then it is off to Oxford for brunch at the French cafe and an afternoon's shopping with Linda. I had originally intended to stay in with them for the afternoon, but they seemed keen to come home together on the bus. Sure enough, they are loaded down with stuff when I meet them off the bus later.

Our evening is focused around me cooking a nice meal - salmon and prawns in a cream and paprika sauce for starter, followed by a dish I have done for years - fillet steak with a cream, onion, mushroom and whiskey sauce. We sit out in the sun room which is nice. Afterwards, we watch Unstoppable, eat Ben and Jerry's Phish food with added malteasers, and generally have a very nice evening.

Sunday is a father-daughter trip to Oxford for lunch together and an hour looking at books in Blackwells.

But I am noticing again that the two of us have moved a long way apart over the past few years. Things we would have talked about in detail in the past are now dismissed as uninteresting. So much of our relationship in the past was taken up with academic issues, that post-Cambridge, we have struggled a bit to re-define our relationship. By contrast, Linda and Emma are much closer now they don't live together and the issues that Emma faces are more likely to be ones that Linda can best address.

I note also that Emma's holiday planning for next year already includes about a week away with Linda, while talk of she and I doing something together has dropped away. As before, I am left with a rather melancholic feeling from the weekend.

Nancy Goldstone's Trading Up

When I graduated from University in 1984, my first job was with one the the "big 8" accounting firms - their standard three year contract to become a Chartered Accountant. I still lived in the East End of London (Leytonstone) and so was allocated to jobs like Coral Bookmakers based in Barking (where I learnt more about risk management that on any other job). And I also got a sprinkling of City banks. I was on the 1986 audit of BCCI which found the huge option losses incurred in the US T-Bond market. And I used to do part of Midland bank, based in their rather nice blue office on Lower Thames Street. One Friday I remember being there when a huge cheer went up at exactly 1:30pm. Some US economic data had come out and Midland were the right way round for its impact on the dollar. Much money was made that afternoon.

I finished my training contract in Oct 1987 and immediately set about trying to get a job in the Square Mile. I was interviewed a number of times at BZW, the trading part of Barclays, for a job on the futures and options desk. I would have been hopeless at that. As it was, my last interview, when I was supposed to be offered my contract was on the Monday of the Stock market crash and recruitment had been frozen, pending the dust settling. So I didn't get that job.

Some months later I was interviewed at Morgan Stanley for a job on their swaps desk, but I seemed keener to talk about the trading than perhaps they wanted - the position was an accountancy one. But the trading bug had taken hold and of course that is what I do now.

Into 1988 and the appearance in one of the bookshops I used to frequent that had a big investment section of Nancy Goldstone's Trading Up, her account of her rapid rise to head of options trading at a major US bank, despite knowing little or nothing about options. I had helped a partner write our firm's guide to auditing currency options and knew far more about them than she did. Yet here she was, head of options trading at 27. The book is wonderful, I have read it four times, and in the immediate aftermath of the completion of the big data bash, I have decided to read it again. I expect it to be great fun

A year or so ago I bought a book about the adventures of a couple of book collectors, and was surprised to discover that it was written by the same Nancy Golstone. And that book was pretty good too.

Otis Kaye's The Stock Market

Friday's Independent features Otis Kaye's picture from 1937 called The Stock Market in its Great Works feature. This is a trompe l'oeil work (an ultra-realistic painting technique which gives the illusion of three dimensions) in which dollar bills, government bonds and various other bits of financial paraphernalia appear to be tacked to, or propped up against a three drawer desk. The path of the dollar bills marks out the progess of the Dow Jones Industrial Average between 1929 and 1937, the bear market of the great depression when the DJIA fell from a 1929 high of around 370 to a low of 36.

Kaye was born in Dresden in 1885 and emigrated to the USA where he worked as an engineer. Late in life, during the Cold War, he returned to East Germany. He apparently sold just two paintings in his life and his art was focused on the subject of money.

I am rather taken with this work

The "data bash" is finished

For the past three months I have been working on a huge data processing project in which a number of variations of our current trading strategy have been thoroughly "blind" tested against six months of old data (from around January 2010 onwards). The aim of this was to produce a final selection from the various methids we have been using with the view of then to trade just this going forward.

The trading systems are too complex to programme into a standard testing package and so each day has to be processed manually. It takes me about 20 minutes to process one day for one market and I have been able to process about 5 days per day for each market we have been looking at. But there have also been many diversions, off into other systems, or other models, where we seemed to have seen something of interest only to have the effect disappear as we process more days of data.

In the past week I have been finally coming to the end of this process. On Monday I still had 56 day to go, by Wednesday it was down to 27, then to 15 by Friday and then at around 10:00 on Sunday morning the last day was done - August 15th 2011, joining the old data from the blind test to the data we have processed in real time. Yet from this process has come the broad family of systems which we will use going forward. No longer will I get a message asking me something like "have we looked at what happends when . . . . .". Instead the focus is on the actually process of complying with the exact models. No more data bashing . . . .

I suspect that last statement will be wrong, but at least i am sure that the issues will be quite small ones to look at - for instance, our methodology for taking our first trades of the day needs looking at in more detail. And so it will go on . . .

But the broad thrust is now done. I am almost overcome with joy!


The last day processed - August 15th 2011

Books I have been reading recently

While I spend most of my time of trading-related data bashing, I have still been able to do a little bit of other reading over the past month or so.

First up, Joe Ambrose's Gimme Danger: The Story of Iggy Pop. The early account of the Stooges and the Bowie years in the 1970s were the best sections of this, but then the story is at its best then as well. He was surprisingly positive about many of Iggy's rather poor 1980s albums (Party may be one of the worst albums ever made by any one), even Avenue B, which sold only 30,000 copies but which I rather like. The book finishes with the early Stooges reunion prior to Ron Asheton's recent death and so doesn't cover the James Williamson Stooges that we saw In Carcassonne. Ambrose is also not above making the odd snide comment about Iggy, which seems well deserved.

More seriously, I have ploughed through Anthony Beevor's Berlin - his account of the Red Army's attack on the city at the end of WWII. I read his book on Stalingrad a few years back and have been slowly re-watching the tv series The World at War, so this has fitted in with a general theme of the last couple of months. I didn't know much about this aspect of the war until now

Les serious is Pamela Des Barres' Let's spend the night together and Chelsea Handler's My Horizontal Life, neither of which are great works but have provided a certain light-heartedness after a long day of work, when I haven't fancied anything else. Groupies have not figured much in my career, it must be said.

Then onto Grace Lee Whitney's The Longest Trek: my tour of the Galaxy. What is there not to like about this? She was the first girl I ever had a real crush on and Yeoman Rand remains one of the great Star Trek characters.

One of the sexiest tv characters ever in my view!

And my current reading? Beevor's Stalingrad.

The World at War

When I was about 11 years old, there was something of a Sunday ritual in our house. I went to Church in the morning at the ultra modern methodist church in town. We methodists are a strange bunch, taken to listening to services and singing hymns in fields. But usually we were at the church.

Then we would have the traditional Sunday roast. Then, in the early afternoon, I would watch The World at War and the ITV football highlights.

I now realise what an amazing programme The World at War was, but at the time no doubt I just thought it was a standard show. It was the first programme were I ever saw a real dead person. I remember the dramatic films of German warplanes bombing - especially the Stukas with their sirens. But mainly, I remember the shows title and end sequence. the opening sequence with the flames and the dramatic music and the high contrast photographs which would seem to burn away. And the little boy in the sequence who looked a lot like my brother, Christopher, who had died a little while before.

I am currently re-watching the entire series, three or four episodes a week and have so far reached about episode 15, Home Fires (Britain 1940-1944). And just a few episodes away is episode 20, Genocide (1941-1945), one of the most amazing things I have ever seen on tv. Aged 11 or so, I had little idea about these events, but that episode has stuck in my mind ever since. How will it be, seeing it again after more than 30 years?

Conditional probabilities & evidence in court

A Dutch guy has been found guilty of murdering a girl in Bristol - and today's papers are full of the fact that the Jury were not allowed to hear that he frequented a series of quite-violent websites. Even Linda was appalled that this had not been allowed in court.

But the reason why this isn't allowed is entirely sound and is based on the fact that people are unable to distinguish between two, very-different conditional probabilities, and tend to believe the wrong one of the two when they do see them both. Actually, the fact that he had seen such website has very little effect on whether he is guilty or not.

Suppose there are 20m adult males in the UK, one of whom is her killer and suppose that 100,000 have seen the websites in question. Then suppose that there are, out of the 20m adult males, 100 potential psychopaths who might be actually willing to kill someone and that 80 of these have seen the website (a much higher proportion than of the general population because they have actively sought out such material). Then you can obtain the following conditional probabilities.

Firstly, the probability that you are a psychopath given that you have seen the website - in this case 80 / 100,000 or 1 in 12,500, 0.0008.

Secondly, the probability that you have seen the website given that you are a psychopath - in this case, 80 / 100 or "5 to 4 on", 0.8, 10,000 times the first probability.

The second probability is not relevant since you don't know that the accused is a psychopathic killer (you only know this when he is convicted - or when he confessed). And the first probability is too small to be relevant. In each case, the website evidence is not relevent.

The website in question was featured in Bizarre Magazine a year or two back and so it is not exactly secret, and quite a few of its scenes are available on the download site that I get stuff off. The few I have seen have been rather cleverly put together I thought. The girls are interviewed before the scene and their willingness to partake is clear cut. Then they are interviewed afterwards as well and again it seems clearcut that they were quite happy with what has occured. Presumably these precautions are to ensure that it is clear that the scenes are consensual. Nontheless, the scenes are very rough it seemed to me.
Typical "before" and "after" pictures. What surprises me more than the contents of the website is that a very pretty 20 year old seems so keen to be featured on it.