I think it would probably depend a fair amount as to which country's intelligence agency you were working for.

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<t>Just a comment: I should not have used the figure "30-40%." Obviously, that is not really possible, and it made me sound naive. Perhaps I should have said, "10-15%."I agree that the odds of someone with my lack of experience is unlikely to be successful at this point. I need to get more experienc...

<t>Thanks to all of you for the great advice and reality checks. I am working with a friend who does not know much about AI, but who is a pretty talented software engineer. He may help me design an automated algorithm based on some of the code I've written thus far. (I'm good at designing algorithms...

Nevermind, it was apparently something wrong with Google finance, or just something I don't get. The company I was looking at was founded in 2006, yet for some reason Google had data available on it dating back to 1993. Maybe a different company had the same symbol, or something?

<t>OK, point taken, but I was asking a serious question. I'll take the point that maybe starting a hedge fund is unrealistic; I thought maybe it was like starting a technology company, which young people with technical skills but no experience do all the time (see paulgraham.com if you don't believe...

<t>Thanks for the reply. I believe you that it will not be easy, and I appreciate your insights into the difficulty of doing what I want to do. I am working on some pattern-recognition ideas that I think might allow me to turn at least a little bit of profit. Do you know what is the minimum amount o...

<t>No, I accessed the file manually, not with a program. I could find data dating back to 1993 on Google Finance for (for example) CHIO. But, when I looked at the Yahoo finance spreadsheet for the same stock, it would only give me back to April 25, 2007. Oddly, though, I could go back to 1986 for MS...

<t>I don't really know anything, but what do others think of The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and/or One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch? I don't know how highly regarded either of these is considered, but each did have a pretty accessible section on reading financial statements, if I re...

<t>I recognize that this is an unrealistic/zany goal for someone in my position (23-year-old with a bachelor's in mathematics, no professional experience in the finance industry; experience with C++ and some AI techniques, but nothing to jump up and down about) as of now, but being ambitious and for...

<t>Hi all,I'm trying to find historical stock prices like the ones on Yahoo Finance for stocks; I'd like to find them in .XLS format, if possible. (Really, any file format would work; .cvs, .txt, whatever, just something that isn't web-based.) Yahoo Finance almost works, but I'm looking for 10-20 ye...