Stock Analysis:
I run into aspiring analysts who often ask, “Where can I get big data?” My answer is always to collect stock market data. You can get end of day data from Yahoo business for the entire history of each stock. If you need bigger, you can collect streaming data of value changes throughout the day. The original reason I took on the challenge was to use the historical data to mark significant historical events and there effect on the global economy.
Challenges:
Without a base of at least $32,000.00 in an account, day trading is not allowed only three trades in a five day period per stock.
The data is only offered between certain hours Monday through Friday.
Outcomes:
I learned how to write a web scrapping application that automatically organizes the data into a JSON file using python.
I Learned how to automate the above program using cron on a Raspberry Pi microcomputer.
I learned how to mount external drives a a linux system so that they automatically remount on startup. A Raspberry Pi computer reads and writes to an SD card. SD cards are not meant to be used constantly. They are used in cameras. Writing to an external drive like a common thumb drive offers less wear on the SD card, but also offers a protection if the computer were to suffer damage, the thumb drive file would still be able to read by another computer.