We flew east out of Panama City, and I looked down on the faceted green hills of the Cordillera de San Blas, perhaps for the last time. In the sky were statistically similar puffs of white cumulus cloud. Naturally, I was thinking of fractals.
I had spent the past few days coding technical analysis indicators in Python, which reminded me of coding same in C#. This, in turn, reminded me that although the TA community talks a lot about geometric repetition, we have yet to invent a single fractal indicator, much less a trading strategy.
I write my trading strategies in C# on the MultiCharts platform. Its procedures for time series data look a lot like the vector-oriented syntax of Python. Here is how to do Bollinger bands in each:
- StandardDeviationCustom(length, devs)
- df[price].rolling(length).std() * devs
I have to admit not having much intuition about vector operations. Matrices and summations just look like for loops to me – clearly an obstacle to the proper appreciation of Python. I have worked with SAS and SYSTAT, though, so Python at the command prompt seems natural.
What I noticed with the Python exercise is that the classic TA indicators were designed with an iterative mindset, reflecting the programming languages of the day – Sapir’s theory, again – and so I imagine that the reason we have no fractal indicators is that our language can’t express them.
Here are some basic things I would expect from a fractal-oriented programming language:
- Create a dataset from a generator function
- Derive fractal metrics, like the Hausdorff dimension
- Compare two datasets for statistical similarity
- Compare a dataset to subsets of itself
Admittedly, I have only a cursory notion of how this would work. That’s why this piece has “speculation” in the title. Meanwhile, I will continue plugging away in C# and Python.
Virag Consulting 