2010 Aug 21 - Sat

The Once Very Valuable ARMS indicator

In 1989, Richard W. ARms, Jr. wrote a book called The ARMS Index (TRIN). In a nutshell, it makes use of various ratios of number of advancing and the number of declining issues. In some cases, it can (or could) be used as a leading indicator of equity market activity.

Oakshire Investment Research's Bourbon and Bayonets newsletter suggested that this may now need to be take with a grain of salt:

It could well be that the 'Hindenberg Omen' is a helpful indicator for those who compute it on a regular basis, but for our part, there are problems associated with it that make it vulnerable to an excessive number of false positives.

It's the same issue, in fact, that plagues the once very valuable ARMS indicator, and some of the McLellan indicators, both of which are reliant on a daily reading of advancing and declining issues in the market.

The problem is this: these systems were designed to work by making a computation of all the market's common stocks, but today there are so many securities that are anything but common stocks that are dressed up and packaged as such . and they comprise an ever increasing number of the total issues trading on exchanges today. That includes bond and money market ETFs, Closed End Funds (CEFs), sector ETFs and preferred shares, not to mention all the reverse ETFs and other derivative products masquerading as common stock.

So to maintain some semblance of usefulness, the calculations will need to be refactored:

In short, both high/low numbers and advance/decline figures are not what they used to be. Certainly, for those who are able to strip out the superfluous aspects and compute the indicators on the basis of common stocks alone, there's something valuable to be had. Otherwise, we wouldn't trust the data as a stand alone indicator.

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2010 Aug 18 - Wed

Cygwin, Eclipse and Subversion Installation Notes

I have written several articles about Eclipse (the code editing UI) and it's integration with subversion. This is an update of a few things to watch out for with Eclipse, the Helios release. I do development on Linux as well as on Windows. In this case my primary machine is a Windows machine running VMWare with several guest Linux systems.

For the Linux systems with a GUI, I've used Cygwin to provide a mechanism of running the Linux interfaces on my Windows interface. I have tried the VMWare Unity mechanism, but on my multi-monitor system, it appears clunky and buggy.

When installing Cygwin, the key library to install is the 'xinit' library. This loads all other necessary X11 libraries. Also include mintty in the Shells category for an improved console experience.

As a side note for regular terminal operations in Cygwin, the following can be used with mintty. Start 'ssh-agent mintty'. mintty is explained at http://code.google.com/p/mintty/. Then use ssh-add to add a private key. The public key can be added to the ~/.ssh/authorized_key files on the destination machines.

Anyway, for getting the GUI experience, use startxwin to start an xwindow terminal window. Connect to the destination computer with 'ssh -l username -Y ipaddress'. At that point, I run eclipse with '/usr/sbin/eclip[se/eclipse &'. The '&' forks the process and allows further operations in the terminal window.

I've got ahead of myself here. To get eclipse installed, I downloaded the binaries from eclipse.org, expanded them to a directory called eclipse. I then moved the directory to /usr/sbin. Eclipse can then be started with '/usr/sbin/eclipse/eclipse'.

For version control, the Polaris subversion client is listed as a standard item in the Collaboration items in the Eclipse New Software. After trying that, I wasn't very pleased with the experience. It is not well integrated.

Instead, I removed the Polaris Subversive client and installed the Tigris.org Subclipose Client. The integration into Eclipse is much better. I used the SVNKit (Pure Java) connector so as to obtain the svn+ssh://... tunnelling capability with a private key based login.

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