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I am currently doing a Master of Science in Financial Engineering (MScFE) with the WorldQuant University (currently they operate tuition free, you can apply via https://wqu.org/) I am in my third course out of total of 12; running into my fifth month out of 18 total months for the MSc.

It has been a very pleasant experience. I found it more structured and rigorous than the non-free MBA I did with a European university. So, if you are interested in the world of quantitative finance and investments, I would say you should give it a try. Just know that getting in is not a walk in the park and the program is very demanding -- you'll do lots of advanced calculus, some python and R programming, some finance and lots of mathematics. 

Last year, I finally got inducted as a chartered stockbroker upon completing the intensive 1 year exams. And due to a pact CIS Nigeria has with UK Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments, I was able to do just one ethics-type exam and become a member of the UK Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments. So I now use the designations ACS and ACISI (UK) in front of my name. And more importantly, I have achieved one of the milestones to my goal of setting up a financial securities trading and investment company.

I hope to use the MScFE to learn the skill of building financial investment products and improving my securities analysis skills.

I have been taking a more structured approach to my investing. I now do a monthly allocation of my ex-expenses disposable income to different asset classes:

• 20% to Real Estate
• 50% to Stocks
• 10% to Money Market
• 20% to Cryptocurrencies

In addition, all my online USD income goes to my US equities account.

The needed push to taking this structured approach to having a portfolio that spans these major asset classes came from the learning in the MScFE course 1 (Financial Markets). So no more thinking asset class A vs asset class B, but how much of asset class A and how much of asset class B.

This year I hope to see more improvement in my personal finance and investments as I learn more from the program and put those learning to practice. 

I have been working hard on our stocks analysis platform -- www.nigeriamarketdata.com -- and some of the recent additions I made are some level of technical analysis incorporation.

Personally, I took a big hit in the stock market this year. I kept buying throughout the year even as stocks were going down. I did not pay too much attention to general buy/sell trends in the market. Actually, I have a disdain for technical analysis, partly because it's a big deal in forex (currency) markets and I have always been losing money in forex (currency) markets. All the fuss about support, resistance, candle patterns and so on looked too abstract and impractical to me. 

The amazing guys at http://tiameetup.com/ were able to make me start seeing where the practicality of technical analysis lies for a fundamentals addict like me. Got to say a big thanks to Adetunji Adeshina. 

The truth is that I am still a fundamentals guy and I don't regret buying throughout the year in stocks. I am as proud of the losses I have made this year as the bumper gains I made last year. The main difference now is that I pay attention to trends -- technical analysis -- and I will be less willing to catch falling knives. I invest month: I usually first take out my savings/investment from my monthly income and live on the remainder. Throughout this year all those monthly investments went to stocks (and ETFs). Going forward, I will spread the money more strategically across all my asset classes; when the stock market is trending massively downwards I will pause monthly inflow into it (except if some amazing deals pop up) and channel more into another asset class that is not evidently trending downwards (also not necessarily evidently trending upwards).

In tracking the stocks market trends, I have designed via Power BI a price and volume action tracker -- showing changes in volume activity and the very important 50 days & 200 days moving averages. You too can access this (for free) in the Power BI section of www.nigeriamarketdata.com 

On the side bar, you can select any company you want to analyse. And at the upper end, there is a timeline to specify the timeframe to analyse for. The upper chart shows the price plotted to the left axis and the volume plotted to the right axis. That way you can see when the market was most active for that stock and what direction it pushed the price. The lower chart shows the current price vs 50 days MA (moving average) and 200 days MA. With these basic technical data -- price, volume and moving average -- you can pull out useful technical analysis.

You can also analyse the entire NSE All Share Index.

Don't worry about the blood stains on the lower chart. I am still trying to figure out the reason for that. 

All these, I created by using Python scripts running on an Azure (cloud) server to store daily trade data on an Azure (cloud) database, then connect Power BI directly to that database with daily auto-refresh set. So without any manual intervention on my part, every day, stocks data is being pulled directly into the charts in Power BI.

If you go through some of my Power BI tutorial videos on https://www.urbizedge.com/Tutorials and https://www.urbizedge.com/PowerBI you will see how I created the core of this particular Power BI report.

Power BI is, indeed, an amazing data analysis tool for better decision making.

Join me today, on Cowrywise Personal Finance Series via this Whatsapp group https://chat.whatsapp.com/invite/CE6CTuwoOs816qeAs8wjVe at 7:00pm Nigerian time as I'll be sharing on how to leverage new platforms for investment.

Below are the slides I will be sharing. And as usual, I'll give very practical illustrations and tips that are Nigerian centric. See you!