Blog Posts

2026

What Does Principal Component Analysis (PCA) Do? Permalink

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Beyond changing basis and reducing dimension, the note asks what else the eigenbasis buys you — total variance surviving the rotation untouched, a gap between in-sample and out-of-sample variance explained signalling a shifted variance structure, and each loading reading as a linear regression coefficient.

How Can We Constantly Be Happy? Permalink

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The note treats constant happiness as a loop rather than a state — happiness and sadness define each other, so sadness is the price already agreed to, arriving on a geometric schedule that makes both long sad and long happy stretches unlikely.

Principal Components and Eigenvectors Permalink

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Maximizing the sample variance after coordinate projection, subject to unit length, turns the first-order condition into an eigenvector equation — so the principal components are the top eigenvectors of the sample variance-covariance matrix, obtainable directly from the right singular matrix of the demeaned data.

How to Design a Limit Order Book? Permalink

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This note aims to answer, but is not limited to, these questions: (i) what operations interact with a limit order book? (ii) what data structures are involved to build a limit order book? (iii) what are market makers? and what are the design principles of limit order book?

An Introduction to Market Auction Theory (MAT) and Order Flow Trading Strategy Permalink

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The note explains how to read a market as a two-sided auction — why price sticks in some ranges (balance) and runs through others (imbalance) — and then introduces the concrete tools (order book/DOM, volume profile, footprint chart, delta/CVD) and the entry rules (ride imbalance, fade exhaustion, read absorption vs. initiation) to act on that reading.

2024

OLS as a Statistical Estimator Permalink

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The companion to the linear-algebra view: here OLS is a random object, checked against unbiasedness, consistency, and efficiency, pushed through the central limit theorem to asymptotic normality, and closed with the degrees-of-freedom-corrected variance estimator that makes the t-statistic usable.

OLS as Orthogonal Projection Permalink

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The note treats OLS as pure linear algebra — no randomness anywhere — deriving the closed form from the first-order condition, pinning existence and uniqueness on linear independence of the regressor columns, and then reading off three fitting properties that follow from residual orthogonality alone.