After my brag post on 3/11, I started noticing a virtual nose dive in paranumeral’s CAPS score (along with accuracy and rating). After quite some soul (and source) searching I think I have found the villain. We’ll hang him and everyone else lives happily ever after ;-) The short of it is that the new code (which now takes into account the company and market price appreciation/depreciation since the last statement date) replaced the old prediction code which was loosely coupled with the SQL code expecting the latest statement to be last. Well the new code predicted using the FIRST record fetched and did not care about stmt date order as it was coded when we fetched statements dated in the last 3 months – there would be just one set of (balance sheet, income and cash flow) stmts. Then around mid March a lot of tickers started coming back with “Invalid tickers or lacking latest statements” so then I changed the code to look for statements dated in the last 6 months (always returning at least one set and often two) BUT failed to change the sort order to chronologically DESCending so the first record would be the most recent set of stmts. So the summary is that all the predictions in the last two weeks of March were coin flips or worse. Amazing how the littlest of things can have the biggest of impacts. And speaking of little things my 6 week old daughter and 20 month old son get the prize for the most impact these days.
