I had heard of R, but I didn't really know anything about it. I knew it was a statistical package, and I knew it had its own language, but I didn't really care about learning how to use it; I wanted to learn to use Clojure, Scala, Ocaml, or Haskell.

One of the reasons I picked Clojure over the other languages is that I knew that I could use code from the Incanter project if I needed some statistical functions.

A link to my content-complete thesis is: https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1kOKjY265a3F5SbN25d...

The thesis is long and boring to read. Let me save you some time. Here it is in a nutshell: Genetic algorithms (GAs) can be used, somewhat successfully, to identify good parameter-sets for technical trading strategies; however, even the "best" GA-identified parameter-sets in my research failed to outperform the buy and hold strategy when trading, with EOD prices, over the course of a randomly picked 1-year period taken from the interval starting January 1, 1985 and ending May 1, 2010.

My code is not available yet because according to the university it belongs to them (ridiculous, I know). I'll have to ask my advisor whether or not I can make it publicly available.