Strateer Blog

In the last few weeks we have been working quietly on integrating all internal and external projects to get ready for launching Alerts4all. In case you have not heard from us or we did not follow up on your email in those last week: this was related to this sprint, which is coming to an end soon with opening up our private Alpha.

In order to get there we had to overcome a couple of internal and external challenges. One of them was to become accredited by all three US exchanges (AMEX, NYSE and NASDAQ) to redistribute real time data. This one was ticked of last week.

Solving the problem of fast access to persistent storage within the Amazon Cloud (we run everything on AWS) has been solved as well thanks to the help of our friends at Amazon that allowed us to become part of the private Beta phase of a service that the community has been waiting for a while. All we can say is, that it works awesome so far.

Integrating our different components that were built by 5 teams who are working from different locations has been another challenge. Getting everything to work together took longer that we anticipated, but that as well is solved. All that remains is the visual fine tuning, which in itself can take some time. But is great to see everything working together and I congratulate the team that has worked tirelessly over the last weeks to get here.

Today one of our architects is hosting a session at Université du Système d’Information in Paris, the major yearly technology event in France (see details here), about CEP - Complex Event Processing.

Complex Event Processing is currently changing the paradigm for investment banks and hedge funds in their race for faster trading algorithms. Outside the financial world, CEP is used in areas where a lot of data has to be analyzed in real-time and fast decision making is required (Example: Fraud Management, RFID etc.).

The underlying paradigm for CEP is to stream data through a statement instead of applying a statement on stored data. Switching around the data and the statement, removes the database (= disk) out of the equation. By applying the data directly on the statement without saving the data first removes a processing step. Both makes the analysis of complex data by order of magnitude more efficient. See the Wikipedia entry here.

For us, CEP is an important enabling technology because the improved efficiency to analyze huge amounts of data can be used not only to make data processing for individual market analysis faster but as well to host thousands of algorithms for market analysis on just a couple of servers. As we are working on enabling individual investors with better and easy-to-use tools, our infrastructure needs to be cost effective and scalable. CEP is one important part to achieve this - especially as we are using ESPER, the only open source implementation.

Howard Lindzon posted on his blog about the trouble most individual investors have selling stock. He has repeatedly talked about the need to have an Exit Strategy when entering a position.

We at Strateer could not agree more. In fact that is one of the problems we want to solve for private investors. Many people buy stocks upon impulse without knowing when to sell them (either taking profits or cutting losses). In addition to that, they don’t have the time to constantly watch their positions - most people have a life.

Our first product that is scheduled to launch shortly will address this issue with an easy to use, straight forward tool. More to follow soon …