Jacques Joubert of Quants Portal, curator extraordinaire of the books at Quantocracy, has collaborated with Robot Wealth to add the humble beginnings of a Machine Learning section to our library.

Denizens of Quantocracy know Robot Wealth well. Within months of launching his blog, RW had already become one of the top rated quant bloggers here at Quantocracy (a feat only matched by Financial Hacker). For a taste of the Robot Master’s brain, check out this brilliant article applying Machine Learning:

http://robotwealth.com/machine-learning-financial-prediction-david-aronson/

RW represents a prototypical example of the quality of workmanship we hope to foster here. RW can be found on his website at RobotWealth.com, or on Twitter at @Robot_Wealth.

Without further ado, the humble beginnings of our Machine Learning library. Have a suggestion for a book to include here? Contact Jacques via LinkedIn, Twitter or email.

Machine Learning with R

An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R

Applied Predictive Modeling

The Elements of Statistical Learning

Statistically Sound Machine Learning for Algorithmic Trading of Financial Instruments

This is not quant related, but I found it interesting and thought it worth sharing for the benefit of our friends in the blogosphere.

Long-time readers remember that we rebranded this site from The Whole Street to Quantocracy at the start of April, 2015. Although the rebranding included changes to our website, nothing other than our name and profile pic changed on our Twitter feed. Both the subject of our tweets, and the way in which we formed our tweets, remained the same.

But interestingly, look at the impact of the rebranding on the number of new Twitter followers per day (dotted line marks the date of rebranding):

In the seven months before the rebranding, we averaged 1.8 new followers per day or 648/year, but in the seven months after, 5.6 per day or 2038/year. That’s more than a 3-fold increase.

Note that we didn’t see even a remotely similar increase in site traffic, and we didn’t do anything radically different in terms of how we promoted the Twitter feed. In other words, the increase wasn’t the result of pushing more users to Twitter. Rather, it was a change in how the Twitter community perceived our Twitter account.

I realize that I just discovered what any first year marketing major could have told me in two seconds, but as a quant nerd, I tend not to think in these terms. The purist in me says that all that matters is the substance of what we do, but as the numbers clearly show, that’s naive.

If the goal of Quantocracy is to build and support this community of quants, then it’s also my responsibility to consider how I “market” this site. I get the heebeegeebees just using that word, but if a simple branding change means that the next amazing piece from Turing Finance, or Quant Start, or Financial Hacker, or Robot Wealth or any of the other 100+ kick ass quants included on the mashup gets more of the recognition that it deserves, then marketing becomes just as important as the substance of what we do. Lesson learned.

Mike @ Quantocracy