Last week AX and MCRB, this week PDCE is our CQNS pick

For more information, please read our brief Medium article: https://chicagoquantum.medium.com/oct-19-stock-selection-oil-gas-325d1542108d
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Medium Article

This pick is an accomplishment for us.  We ran data validation and our two-step analysis on current market data.  This is the first time for us.

We do, however, have more work to do on the model.  We need to understand the impact of recent model changes.

Model change 1:  This iteration of the model uses a more sophisticated data validation process (to save time).  It does make one 'shortcut' that we will evaluate.  We had stocks without valid data on one day, and instead of dropping the full day from all stocks, we replace the value with a zero before we take the log price change. 
Model change 2:  This change was to replace the market indices with the market ETFs.  This reduces the BETA of the stocks (tightens the range) as the ETFs trade in a tighter price range.  We made this change only in Step 1, and will reflect it into Step 2.  This allows individual investors to hold the indices as stocks instead of having to purchase options.

We also continue to tune our solvers to run the analysis in a reasonable amount of elapsed time.  The longer we can run our algorithms, the better the potential for finding deeper local minima and 'better' answers.  To this end, we may also bring out our server to increase the speed of the processing.

​Jeffrey Cohen, October 20, 2020 (7:55am CDT).