What My Z-Score Indicator Taught Me About Chasing Better Numbers
Lessons from building a KAMA Z-score indicator: backtest overfitting, market regimes, and open-source Pine Script and Python code you can inspect.
Read the analysisErika Barker · Research & writing
Data Science &
Quantitative Research.
I build models, study market regimes, and explain the evidence.
Builder and operator of Regime Analytics.
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Michael Burry, the AI boom, and the bill that comes due
Why I take Michael Burry seriously, where I question his arguments, and how AI spending, GPU lifetimes and circular financing shape the investment case.
From market mood to Regime Analytics
The retired economic-dashboard prototype that helped shape Erika Barker’s interest in predictive analytics and statistical market regimes.
Palantir and the price of moving faster
My military procurement experience helps me understand Palantir’s appeal. It also leaves me asking what faster decisions cost democratic accountability.
What the data says about the American middle class
What middle-class security means beyond an income label: housing, savings, ownership and the freedom to make choices, with sourced charts and a household-budget example.
Gradient boosting: how the trees learn together
An explanation of boosting, loss functions and regularization, with practical limits on interpretability and financial-model evaluation.
Miami keeps building. Who can afford to live in it?
From a Wynwood balcony to the household budget: Miami rents, local wages, transportation costs and the businesses that make a neighborhood worth living in.
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From visual journalism to statistical market research: the ideas, experiments and revisions behind the work.
Palantir writing cited by Forbes contributor Peter Cohan, August 2025.
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