Christian showed me his last Lego NXT creation yesterday. It is a scorpion that walks around and stings stuff. If he has time to email me a photo or a video of the thing, I will put it up here on the website (Note to Christian: Get your all of your homework finished before doing this!). It was one of the example projects in the manual, but he wrote and used his own programs. There are several other things he can make and program, but he is getting to the point where it would be great for him to program it with something other than the point and click software that comes with the Lego NXT. His latest innovation is that he set up the computer and the robot controller so they can communicate over Bluetooth, so he no longer has to connect to the computer with a serial port. Christian is far enough along in his C# programming tutorials now that I think the next step will be to get him programming the robot controller using C#. He has downloaded the SDK (software development kit) from Microsoft), so I think I can get him going with a minimal amount of hand-holding. The biggest issue is getting the programs download from the PC to the controller.
As for my programming projects, I have decided to port my stock picking program from C# mono to C++. The stock picking program implements the methods described in Joel Greenblatt’s book The Little Book that Beats the Market. The methods are what I would call conservative methods for long-term investors; Day traders need not apply. I am doing the port for two reasons. The technical reason is that I do not know if C# will have much of a future in the Linux world and I love programming in C++ using QT and KDevelop. The second reason as that I plan to use the program and the book next year as a homeschool program to teach Kelly and Christian about investing. I blogged, earlier, about making stock picks. The first two stocks I picked with the program are spectacularly bad–I actually had one of the two formulas upside down in my program when I picked those stocks. The subsequent six stocks I picked with the program are fabulous. I am just doing dry trading (tracking the stocks only without buying any). Of course, I am going to run this for at least a year and a half longer before we start putting anything into it for real. That will give the kids a year of practice and the program two years of testing.
After an average of nine months in the market, a $6000 pretend investment in the S&P 500 is up $559 for an annual growth rate of almost 12.5%. Program picked stocks purchased at exactly the same time as the S&P 500 investment have returned $1110 for an annual growth rate of over 24.5%. We are in a growth market, but this is not an inauspicious start. Most of all, though, it will be a fun way for the kids to learn about investing for the long haul while they are learning about business at the same time.