Contact me here.
Posts
Investing in Bitcoin-related Securities A prior post titled “ Bitcoin USD Exchange Rates Versus Major Market ETFs ” compared growth rates for the bitcoin-USD exchange rate from the Yahoo Finance site versus exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for the top 100 securities in the S&P 500 index (OEF) and the NASDA-100 index (QQQ). The comparisons show bitcoin exchange growth rates are between 5 and 2.9 times greater, respectively, than for the OEF and the QQQ ETFs. As inviting as these outcomes are for investing in bitcoins, you cannot invest directly in bitcoin exchange rates. Furthermore buying, holding, and selling bitcoins is substantially more complicated and riskier than buying and selling an ETF. Investopedia features an introduction to some of the mechanics and historical price swings associated with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Forbes lists the top ten risks associated with buying, holding, and selling bitcoins. Some of these risks are technology based, o
Bitcoin USD Exchange Rates Versus Major Market ETFs During my early years as a developer, I encountered an executive who would often shout “developers, developers, developers…” at the beginning of his conference presentations until he turned red in the face or ran out of breath. He retired as a very rich person. This experience motivates me to write “bitcoins, bitcoins, bitcoins…” because the post is meant to move data analysts along the path to enjoying a rich, fulfilling, and early retirement via bitcoin investing. The BTC-USD ticker at the Yahoo Finance site tracks the price of a bitcoin in US dollars. The bitcoin.org website describes bitcoins as a new kind of money (store of value) on its home page; bitcoins exist on the internet in a blockchain network. The network enables bitcoin miners to track bitcoin ownership between those owning bitcoins and those accepting bitcoins in exchange for goods and/or services. Bitcoin miners are rewarded with new bitcoins for eac
How to Download and Display Historical Price and Volume Data Data are the lifeblood of analytics, and this post aims to give you an introduction to downloading historical price and volume data from Yahoo Finance. Google’s Gemini app claims that the Yahoo Finance site attracts as many as 100 million visitors per month. Some reasons for this degree of popularity may be because the site offers free news videos, price quotes, and historical data. It also offers a premium line of services in addition to its free services. After you collect historical data, you can analyze the data by transferring them to your favorite analytics package. This post includes simple demonstrations for how to transfer historical data downloaded from Yahoo Finance to three different popular analytics packages (i.e., Excel, SQL Server, and Python). What kind of historical data will you learn to download? The following screenshot shows an example of the type of historical data that this pos