On the humanity of mathematical models
A great deal of care is spent designing our algorithms and models at Wealthfront. The work of Qian Liu and others is put through trial runs against historical data, peer reviewed by members of the company, and vetted by outside advisors in the academic and private sectors. Along with Dr. Malkiel, we also work with… Read more
Hurricane Sandy puts YAGNI to the test
On Sunday night, Oct 29th, we learned that most US equities markets would be closed the next day due to Hurricane Sandy. This is very unusual: the only times the market has been closed since the four days following 9/11 have been the National Days of Mourning following the deaths of Presidents Reagan and Ford,… Read more
Developing a Portfolio Backtester in R
As part of building our new Tax-Loss Harvesting (TLH) feature, we needed to build a portfolio backtester to simulate portfolio performance over a historical period. R was the obvious choice for its strength in statistics and finance; the R Finance community in particular has created a number of very useful packages, some of which we’ll talk… Read more
Building the Startup Compensation Visualization
We recently published a company blog post titled Manage Your Tech Career that featured a visualization of “Startup Salary & Equity Compensation” across different job functions, levels, company sizes and regions. The post received more traffic than we anticipated, and a lot of people have asked questions about the tool. Here I’d like to tell… Read more
Explore Your Multivariate Data with Crossfilter
In every business, developing a deep understanding of your customers is a necessity if you want to consistently exceed their expectations for your product or service. Every page a customer views is likely generating metrics that will eventually be crunched and digested in every effort to help your company improve even just a little bit… Read more
Do They Really, Really Like You?
For decades, companies have been trying to figure out if you like them using various surveys — long and short, direct and not — as the primary tool to get you to talk about your relationship with them. And, for decades, you’ve mostly ignored them, responded sometimes, and largely avoided talking about your relationship. As… Read more