Stats

["W Lake" <wlake@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for your emails

It sounds as if you are getting "nickled and dimed" reading the TASC and
Futures Mag articles. Even a series of articles will make the technique
sound very interesting but not give you enough background to really
understand why it works or doesn't work. That can be dangerous in the
markets that you are interested in <G> ... Ruggiero, Stridsman and Holder,
that you mentioned, can run right past you in the space of a couple of
sentences.

Re the Regression and other stats articles ... you might want to get a copy
of "Statistics for Managers using Excel". It's about 800 pages and it will
help you see how all those "neat" ideas fit together. I think that there's a
second edition out now. My copy is an updated 1998 edition. I think that it
cost me $9 in the used book store. For anything that XL can't handle, you
can easily run the data into KyPlot.

There are also older introductory Linear Algebra textbooks available very
cheaply, especially if you can find books that are application based. There
are two calculus books that I like that may help. One is published by
Barrons and is management and application oriented and the other is geometry
based, since you are also visually based in your analysis.

I use Derive 5 for all of that sort of math stuff. The user interface is
very easy to use and you can probably find a free copy.

Of course, Kaufman's 2 big books will help you make the conversion from the
textbooks back to trading. Run his code into TS, most of his code is pretty
clean and you shouldn't have any difficulty. There are the odd bits in
Quattro that are pretty easy to convert to XL. You might wanted to consider
that some of the mag writers don't use the same code that they publish.

Best regards

Walter