Han Solo, Garmin, Activity tracking(in more ways than one) and Math
I watched the new Solo file on Sunday, that is the Han Solo film from Disney’s new range of films. I enjoyed it, the sci-fi-ness of it, the environments and scenery were cool. It's nice to be back in space and seeing fantastical concepts in motion. I also finally decided to invest in a new watch which had been a long time in the making. I finally settled on a Garmin forerunner 235 with integrated wrist-based heart rate monitoring. You can read about it here:Smash-run, Garmin 235 and various things. Its actually very nice and I’m very happy with my decision. So I’ve retired my long-serving and faithful Suunto Ambit 1 which was showing its age but was resilient.
I a couple of weeks back I added more functionality to my investment project, adding token-based authentication with JWT tokens as well as implementing the preliminary ideas behind role-based access. This now means that you can’t log in without signing up.
Also I added the first of my auditing functionality which keeps a record of the changes that have occurred throughout the investment predominantly but there are other audit activities such as ‘created a user’ etc. over and above the more useful activities within an investment such as ‘Changed value’, ‘associated factor x with investment’ etc that sort of thing.
That’s the login page, which protects all the pages unless a valid token is held by the user (having signed up and then logged in). The activity log that I mentioned looks something like this.
You’ll also notice that I’ve added a new top nav-bar which looks kinda nice although it doesn’t do much (except hold a logout button) but I think I’ll start moving more functionality into it moving forward.
There are some things that I’d still like to do but I’m as of yet uncertain how I’d like to do them. For instance, I’d like to add a value-system so that I can evaluate and compare investments. Particularly how values are performing. I’ve got some ideas about setting up a correlation matrix and/or Monte-Carlo simulation using investments stock history prices(time-scale end-of-day prices etc) but I’m unsure how or If I want to store this information in the SQL database. Also, There isn’t a consistent (and free) way to query financial information live across both UK and US stocks. So this is on the back-burner until I have a satisfactory plan of action.
I almost forgot I’ve also added per individual Group, Factor, Risk and Region relationships diagrams. What this means is that for a given one of those aforementioned entities, if you select one from any investment, it will show you all the other investments that also have this entity, pictorially – you could already see this relationship through the listing of related investments but I like graphs.
Apart from that there are a few other inconsistencies that I’d like to address such as making navigation to and from pages that link to other investments more useful, for instance on the graph above, I’d like to that node links on the graph to be clickable and I’d like (possibly) to include a history of past navigations – but this isn’t really all that necessary and more a nice to have.
Also, I’ve started doing a series of blogs on Math fundamentals starting and my latest post being ‘What are fractions really?’. This is an effort to expose some of the underlying assumptions that most people don’t have when they talk about mathematics which is a problem I’ve encountered and I’m sure many have too – been hurried through math without due diligence. You can explore further what I mean in my mini-rant about the topic of general education of math in this article. Most of my best insights so far has come from a book I’m reading called “Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning”.