projectfalcon

2 June 2009, 8:05 pm

So, its already the second of june and im procrastinating the hell out of my project.  Its due the 5th this month and it has to be bound and burned into a cd.  So farr, my progress is 6 pages and i have only pasted some simple graphs explaining the trends of the Indonesian exchange rate against the Australian dollar.  The target is a 40 page essay that involves me to generate a model that can forecast next months exchange rate at a high confidence level... gah...

If you are wondering what subject im doing, its MAE305 Financial forecasting.  The subject is pretty awesome as it teaches us on how to forecast interest rates, gdp, and whatever business stats by using some forecasting techniques.  Basically, we take some raw data (eg:  monthly employement stats, quarterly interest rate stats or yearly gdp stats) and turn them into line graphs, scatter plots and other types of graphs to detect trends.  Then we make a model based on those data to generate a formula to calculate next months data. 

Now, you may think that this involves statistics or whatever, and i have to say it does a little.  For one thing you have to understand what standard deviation are, null-hypothesis etc etc to understand the models.  Knowing that i hate stats, it was quite hard for me to catch this subject.  In addition to that, there wasn't alot of people taking the subject which means i have to survive it on my own. 

Thou this subject has a little statistics in it, i kind of like it because it teaches us to understand business data better.  Most of the time i see graphs and well we always see its trends right? like if the line graph goes up or down.  But in this subject, you can guess alot of things and explain what might be the cause of why the line goes up or down (eg: some patterns can show that the country has a new monetary policy, war, unemployment, recession etc, its pretty cool). 

We also use this software called E-views which is an econometric software that helps us genereate graphs from data sets.  Its a pretty neat tool as it can generate models and graphs in an instant. My lecturer told me it can take quite a loong time to genereate one model with hand and its prone from human errors, making it a bad model.

So yeah its really cool, and hard hehehe.... especially this project... wooh i never had to do a project that needs 40 pages....


Today is also the day i opened this account and this is my first article, neato.  At least, i can procrastinate and write something about something rather than play Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead... god the hours i spent on those games.. kind of regret building this new rig and spend countles hours which i shud have use for studiying.