Some random updates.

I do not have a major insight to share this week as I have been hard at work writing programming code in R and also preparing to be Emcee for a friend's wedding tomorrow.

Here's what's been happening in my life :

a) A nice book review from BigFatPurse.

You can find a review of my book here :

http://www.bigfatpurse.com/

The reviewers have been very kind to provide quite a favorable review of my first book.which was the only piece of work which broke even financially after accounting for my costs. It is also a book which I was very self-conscious about because I did not hire an editor to review my work which is still riddled with grammatical mistakes.

Nevertheless, Growing Your Tree of Prosperity was a bestseller in Singapore for a week and I still get orders for it today on this website. Maybe it's because the book contains my original voice which was not altered by any proof-reader.

Although I make it a point to distribute my third book Sowing the Seed of Prosperity as I felt that it was work which was truly aimed at beginners and had much better editing, people were just more interested in my first piece of work.

b) Completed the Data Science Specialization in Coursera

It's been a very rewarding journey with Coursera for the past 3 months. I count Coursera as the best thing which happened to me after I retired from the work force. I was able to continue to pursue my interest in Software Engineering beyond my previous career.

Within the past three months, I was able to :

i) Perform regression on scientific data.
ii) Use machine learning ( random forests ) to predict someone's movement given his fitbit data set at a 95% accuracy.
iii) Start creating web apps that work on financial data from Yahoo. You can see a simple prototype here which uses local ETFs to simulate the behavior of a portfolio of ETFs. ( The Permanent Portfolio )

https://invictus666.shinyapps.io/Portfolio/

This was created using R and deployed on a Shiny server.

I think this is the beginning of my data science journey, I expect to keep coding even as a law student, there are too many things I want to investigate, like how much correlation exists between local stocks and ETFs and how we can use R to generate an asset allocation which maximizes the information ratio ( Markowitz Efficient Frontier  in actual practice).

c) Preparation for Law School

Preparation for Law School will likely go full steam ahead in the coming weeks. I have almost completed a fairly long reading list on how to survive Law School. As an adult learner, I will be employing some of the latest findings in Psychology to plan my approach to study and retain the relevant materials.

Expect this blog to take on a bigger role which will discuss strategies and tactics on how to study so investors who are also life-long learners will find some interesting ideas on how to tackle their next upgrade.