Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a stock analysis and prediction application called Quantile for a freelance client. It is now finished. The numeric analysis tools are, anyway. Statistical predictors are going to be in v2.0, because teaching has left me too busy to continue work on it at the moment.

This is a bad market to train it on thanks to all of the nonsense going on in the financial industry and rippling through the market, but when/if the market stabilizes (and when I have more time), I am going to begin training it and performing dry runs. It’s a nifty little tool, and if the quantitative trading firms (all of which are foundering in the market right now, which I am getting a kick out of) thought I didn’t have the experience to do this when they contacted me several months ago, they were sadly mistaken. I’ve studied these sorts of algorithms extensively, and the mathematics that they consider difficult do not impress or faze me.

They wanted my work without compensating me for it – but my mind isn’t theirs to control or tap. It is my own, and it is time that people began to realize what that means. It is the asset that will preserve me through any market, for it can never lose its value and it is the source of all the wealth I possess. I could lose it all and build it right back up again, so long as I can think. I can apply this power to anyone I wish – but only in a fair agreement of mutual consent.

This is how capitalism should work. All the financial companies have demonstrated to me recently is how it should not.