That's Right; This Is The Program That Locked Down The World

 

From Martin Armstrong's blog:

I have been asked by a source in Britain to review the Ferguson model code for my opinion. Just so everyone has some idea, the original program used by Ferguson was “a single 15,000 line file that had been worked on for a decade” and by no means is this remotely sophisticated. I seriously doubt that Imperial College will want to go public with the code because it is that bad.

To try to keep this in trader’s terms, reviewing the code reveals this is just a stochastic which is INCAPABLE of forecasting high, low, or projected price target expected to be achieved. Any trader knows that a stochastic is a trend following measure not a forecaster of the trend nor a projection tool to say when a market is overbought or oversold. This clearly shows the vast chasm between trading models and academic models where the money is never on the line. The documentation even states:

“The model is stochastic. Multiple runs with different seeds should be undertaken to see average behaviour.

 

 “Stochastic” is simply defined as “randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” In other words, they begin with a presumption, and therein lies the FIRST error. Ferguson’s assumption was wrong, to begin with. Then this mode is so old, they recommend that it be run only on a single CORE processor as if we were dealing with an old IBM XT.

 

Effectively, you start the program with what is called a “seed” number which is then used to produce a random number. Most children’s games begin this way. In fact, this is a version of what would be similar to the game SimCity where you create a city starting from scratch and it simulates what might happen based upon the beginning presumption. The code has numerous bugs, and the documentation suggests running it several times and taking the average. This is just unthinkable!

A program should produce the same result with the same data from which it begins. Therefore, there is no possible way this model would ever produce the same results. In reality, this model produces completely different results even when beginning with the very same starting seeds and parameters because of the attempt to also make the seed random. This is not even as sophisticated as SimCity, which is really questionable. This is where the Imperial College claims that the errors will vanish if you run it on an old system in the single-threaded mode as if you were using a 1980s XT.

In programming, you run what is known as a regression test, which is re-running a functional and non-functional test to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change. In market terminology, it’s called back-testing. In the most unprofessional manner imaginable, the Imperial College code does not even have a regression-test structure. They apparently attempted to but the extent of the random behavior caused by bugs in the code to prevent that check. On April 4th, 2020, Imperial College noted:

“However, we haven’t had the time to work out a scalable and maintainable way of running the regression test in a way that allows a small amount of variation, but doesn’t let the figures drift over time.”

This Ferguson Model is such a joke it is either an outright fraud, or it is the most inept piece of programming I may have ever seen in my life. There is no valid test to warrant any funding of Imperial College for providing ANY forecast based upon this model. This is the most UNPROFESSIONAL operation perhaps in computer science.