Reflection

Looking back, I am very satisfied with the work I have done this summer. I started off the summer by working on my NEAT project and taking the course Financial Management 311. The beginning of this course focused on how to construct an income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. The next big concept this course covered was the time value of money and compound interest. I learned about the time value of money by doing present and future value calculations in excel. The last section of this course focused on bonds and capital budgeting decisions. I first learned about bonds and bond ratings, but quickly began performing NPV, payback period, discounted payback period, and IRR calculations.


Financial Management 311 was very informative and a fun summer class. This course greatly expanded my knowledge of financial instruments and capital budgeting decisions. Although this class consumed a lot of my time, I was still working on other things. I continued my NEAT project during this time and was able to finish my website.


After finishing Financial Management 311, I started taking Principles of Management Accounting 202. This course started by helping me understand the differences between financial and management accounting. Next, I began to learn about different cost classifications, and the basic manufacturing cost categories. With this new knowledge of cost classifications, I started to create traditional and contribution format income statements. Moving on from contribution income statements, I learned how to calculate the predetermined overhead rate and the different ways overhead is allocated. After learning about manufacturing overhead, I began to learn about costing methods and the flow of costs from raw materials to the cost of goods manufactured. Finally, the last few chapters for this course focused on Cost Volume Profit analysis, break even analysis, ROI, and Residual Income calculations.

Summer Research Update

Throughout the summer, I continued to work on my NEAT project while taking the summer courses described above. After reading several papers about algorithms predicting stock price movement, I decided to change my algorithm so it is predicting whether the closing stock price will go up or down. Previously my algorithm predicting the closing price for the next day, but now it just predicts whether the price is going up or down. After changing the expected outputs, here was the algorithm accuracy for all models:

After running NEAT I created a random forrest algorithm using the python library scikit learn. The new random forrest algorithm performed very similiarly to my NEAT. For the next few weeks, I plan on becoming more familiar with the scikit learn library.