What My Z-Score Indicator Taught Me About Chasing Better Numbers
What moving from HMA to KAMA taught me about Z-scores, backtest overfitting, market regimes, and the limits of better-looking results.
Read the analysisErika Barker · Research & writing
I build models, study market regimes, and explain the evidence.
Builder and operator of Regime Analytics.
What moving from HMA to KAMA taught me about Z-scores, backtest overfitting, market regimes, and the limits of better-looking results.
Read the analysisHow to examine AI capital spending, depreciation, cash flows and power constraints without treating a plausible risk scenario as a proven collapse.
The retired economic-dashboard prototype that helped shape Erika Barker’s interest in predictive analytics and statistical market regimes.
My military procurement experience helps me understand Palantir’s appeal. It also leaves me asking what faster decisions cost democratic accountability.
How to interpret changes in middle-income population share without confusing income, wealth, money velocity or a prediction of national collapse.
An explanation of boosting, loss functions and regularization, with practical limits on interpretability and financial-model evaluation.
How to evaluate Miami housing affordability, inventory and local economic conditions without inventing a crash probability.
Behind the byline
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.
About Erika & selected citation