Features
StockWave has many features - several are, we believe, unique; we think our software is the best for you because we give you, all the "basic stuff you need" plus more advanced methods - but also our own "special sauce", and all for a price far short of what others charge; they ask more, for much less!
Unique Features
Data Fusion
We combine news and
price data to give a global view, plus have support for fundamentals and deep company research. Our view is that all aspects are important and contain information, but
approximately in that order of relevance - the share price itself, news events which directly influence the share price, fundamentals which mostly do so indirectly and also the aggregated
"unquantifiable buzz" about a company, its business, people and practices. Our tool-set lets the user explore, identify and use all of this information, and is the only software which
champions this unified approach to data analysis.
Visualisations
All our analyis techniques
output easily-graspable visual outcomes; we have
recently added powerful 3D facilities for the
interactive exploration of large datasets. This allows for the open-ended exploration of heterogeneous data and will facilitate complex, customised model building.
Hybrid Probabilistic and Machine Learning
Algorithms
We use novel combinations of Monte
Carlo methods and AI algorithms; this includes
Neural Network Analysis Algorithms which 'learn'
directly from the data, featuring a choice of
architectures - Back-Propagation Multi-layer
feedforward network with bias and momentum, or
Kohonen Self-Organising Maps, or
Recurrent Feedforward with memory, plus our
own Bayesian Correlator advanced
probabilistic prediction technique. Our analytics
are about the future not the past.
These 'heatmaps' - i.e. 2-dimensional probability distributions are the basic tool we use in our analysis, allowing us to design trading strategies based upon the precise, calculated, probability / 'chance' of an event occurring; these are far superior to often unquantifiable and inscrutable trading signals produced either by user-created heath-robinson-type models or third party black-box techniques; once you have a probability, you know how to trade - though sometimes the answer is : "not at all".
It is our hope to bring "quant"-style techniques and thinking to the retail investor, who is alas more commonly interested in weak, ad-hoc, forms of technical analysis, mostly using oscillators and crossovers.
Price Charting with Integrated News Viewer
A basic idea, but a powerful technique none-the-less is to show news events along with the share price history - this allows a simple and fast visual inspection by the user;
despite our trumpeting of our "advanced computational techniques" the human brain and visual system is often the most powerful "computer" there is - so a quick scan of what's
been happening can tell you a great deal, for example, a company with legal problems, or has trouble meeting its estimates. As well as showing the timing of news stories in
relation to share price history we also provide full text-searching facilities for the news archive.
News Analysis Tools
While viewing prices and news together is a nice idea, and very useful in itself, it only takes you so far - for example, how can you quantify the real effects of these
news stories? Some are more important than others, some are good, some are bad, some have long lasting effects, some have short lasting effects, some seem to matter, some do not at all
- to answer these questions and take our analysis further we provide a suite of our own custom news analysis algorithms and visualisation tools; this can eventually lead to (when there is
enough data) a fully calibrated news event model which can model the typical "shocks" the share price will be exposed to, which can then be used as another "noise source" in our
Monte Carlo simulations.
Deep Research
We provide a customised web-spider which can be used to investigate all aspects of a company's business - the kind of things that aren't shown in the media, the financial news or the
company report, the kind of information which is almost impossible to quantify, but does in fact, represent what is "really going on" under the covers of a company; the spider uses search engines
to seed itself, then uses the equivalent of guesswork to "sniff" its way across the various links it finds; when a new page is found, any interesting text can be extracted. The
aggregations of the extracted text can then be visualised to show : other companies and organisations, people, commonly occurring concepts, and furthermore the relationships between all
of these - it in effect "draws a picture" of the company and its operations.
Advanced Features
Customisable Programming Interface and
Scripting
An API and library has been created for the
Python programming language; to get the full power of
StockWave just the way you want, simply "import
stockwave" and away you go. This way you can use StockWave as "just" another tool in your box, as much or as little as you want, selectively - you don't need to
abandon any useful or previously successful systems you have created.
Python was chosen as our scripting language as it is particularly simple and powerful, it is also popular within the financial sector and thus has a great many libraries for interfacing with other services, in particular, datafeeds and brokerages. Another good reason for choosing Python is that it's free - and you can download it from web; if you want a custom IDE there are choices available - this makes it much better, cheaper and easier than say requiring an installation of Visual Studio, or learning some unique language of our own we have just cooked up. Learning Python is generally useful.
Signal Processing and Filtering
Many investors use moving averages or oscillators in their analysis - it is questionable whether or not these are much use, at least in their basic forms, although some vendors
have created their own custom filters which supposedly have better properties, an example being a "moving average without lag".
StockWave allows for the filtering of share price data but does so using the more mathematically rigorous methods of Fourier and Wavelet Transforms - these allow precise
identification of "signal" and "noise" components which are subsequently used as de-noising and data pre-processing stages for our monte carlo analysis.
Trade Creator
When new to investing one learns very quickly how inflexible traditional buy and hold stock picking is - the brokers make it easy to go long, but make it hard to go short
(you may find it hard to "pick a winner" but may find it easier to spot a loser), and also if you trade a lot you find that the commissions and trading costs are too high, often
you find that you are "churning" your account for no real gain (- though the broker has his fees!); to solve this problem, other types of trades have been created (CFDs and Spread-Bets),
types of derivative, which are designed to give greater flexibility - this is great, but starts to make things a lot more confusing.
One important type of derivative is the "option" - the great innovation of this type of instrument is that it allows the user to hedge a position or create leverage, furthermore, as well
as making basic directional bets - going long or short based on whether the stock will go up or not - you also have the ability to, effectively, make a bet on "either up or down" or
"stays where it is"; thus with adding options to our list of possible trades we can potentially exploit any type of information we may have; anything we "know" can be exploited to our
profit. If you have a mathematical bent, these trade types form a "basis" for all trading possibilities, thus using combinations of them allows us to make specific trades with the
payoff profiles we want.
The major problem with all of this reasoning is -simply- how utterly complicated it all becomes; plain "vanilla" options are hard enough for the layman to grasp, but when you start to
combine these trades into complex configurations, ... it all seems just hopeless. To fix this problem StockWave has its "TradeCreator" form which allows the user to craft any type of
custom trade he chooses and see the result summarised in our easy to read, Payoff Graphs - this shows you what you stand to win or lose, and gives you a precise probability for each.
Options Strategies Browser
In options trading there has a grown a rich terminology for the many types of options combinations - in our options strategy browser you can see the classification, construction, risk
and payoff profiles for the most common strategies.
Automated Trade Searcher
Even with the TradeCreator and OptionBrowser, searching for, and "hand-crafting" a viable trade can be very time consuming - and by the time you've found something you like the
market may have moved against you.
To solve this problem we also have an Automated Trade Searcher - this exhaustively searches among a large space of combination trades to find the most profitable, high probability trades.
With this one can narrow things down to a few candidate trades, then inspect them individually back on the TradeCreator.
Sophisticated Multi-Level Alarms
Once you've actually made a trade you should monitor it closely - this could mean sitting for hours every day in front of multiple computer screens with your nerves set to "hair trigger";
but if this is what you are going to do, then you really should do it professionally - why not just get a job in the City?
StockWave has an alert system for normal people who don't want to be professional traders - when you make a trade an alarm is created which creates "safe" and "dangerous" regions for the
share price to move into; if the trade moves off track you will be sent an email which shows an image of the current situation; also, there are two other kinds of alarm, one which monitors for
significant news events, and another which watches for "price spike" events (- which can happen without warning). StockWave constantly monitors your portfolio and sends you email alerts if anything
goes wrong - so now anyone with a smartphone can trade the markets with a degree of safety. N.B. - it should of course be stated that every trade you make should also have a trading plan to be strictly
adhered to, i.e. make your own rules for when you will close a trade, or roll it over.
Basic Features
StockWave does, of course, do all the sort of "normal stuff" every other stock trading package does -
Datafeeds
We have coverage for the main stock markets in the US, UK, EU and also support for India and Australia - i.e.
FTSE 100, FTSE 250, FTSE AIM, Dow Jones, Nasdaq 100, EuroStoxx 50, NSE 500, ASX 100. We get Free prices and news
from the web. New stocks can be added to the database by the user.
Technical support for users with various commercial datafeeds is available, but depends strongly on the details - we will try to get -whatever- you've
currently got piped into our system, but note that not all datafeed vendors encourage you or even allow you to do this; for example Bloomberg regard
any data extracted from a Bloomberg terminal, outside say an Excel spreadsheet, as "theft" (more or less).
Note that due to the new Python interface, any third party which publishes a Python API, will be usable in StockWave.
Batch Data Downloader
This allows the mass download of historical price data from free sources, thus allowing the user to backfill his datafiles quickly.
Historical Data Archive
StockWave includes several hundred megabytes of news and price data for the last five years.
Technical Analysis
For those of you who need the familiarity of your current and more usual tools, we still supply these - so you can still get your
MACD, RSI, Bollinger Bands, Parabolic SAR and Stochastics here.
Advanced Charting
Our price charts allow for viewing data at any timescale and easy zooming in and out; whether you want to look at last year, last month, today, or the
past 5 minutes, you can do so easily.
Histogram
See the distribution of price movements.
Multi-Chart
Plot two charts together for visual comparison.
Scatter Chart
See how movements of one stock are related to another's.
Portfolio Tools
View your trading history, monitor open positions and review analyses.
Tutorials and Help
Over 200 pages of accessible web page based information, written in a straightforward, non-technical style.
