2007 Jul 31 - Tue
Trading Site of the Day -- MoneyScience
MoneyScience, according to the footer on the website, is 'an open access
resource for academics and practitioners working in quantitative finance and related
fields'.
I should have listed this site earlier as I've used it to get introduced to sites I've
already added to my Trading Site of the Day lists. It appears to be supported through
private funding from a number of well known financial institutions.
The site has a number of primary groupings: Events calendar, Recruitment, Recently
Posted (blog articles from other sites), Products and Services, Latest Sites (links to
articles, .pdf's, and such), and has a forum.
The site format has improved over the time the owner has had it up, but could use a few
more spruce-ups: the primary RSS feed title could point back to the main site, rather than
the aggregator's site. I'm also wondering if things are slowing down as the Featured Event
is one from last month.
Anyway, overall, the site as it gets updated, is a good link for quant minded individuals
looking for a hopping off point to related research.
[/Trading/SiteOfTheDay/D200707]
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2007 Jul 29 - Sun
Internet Based 911
For those of you setting up IP based telephone solutions and are needing to set up E911
connections, there are a number of ways to do this.
The typical way to do this is to ensure that analog or digital lines are available at
each location being serviced. Then be sure to route all calls originating from those
specific geographical areas are sent out the nearest POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service)
line, ie, analog or digital line.
If this isn't possible, for one reason or another, there is an alternate way of doing
this.
There are internet based E911 services available. According to Robert Kulagows, you "setup
something like a SIP trunk and route e911 calls to them. You'd tell them which DIDs are
located in which city, and allow them to handle the
911 call and send it to the correct PSAP."
One provider who can do this is 9-1-1
Enable. According to their site, they are in the Pulver 100 and the Internet Telephony
2006 Product of the Year.
[/Cisco/Callmanager]
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2007 Jul 28 - Sat
Manipulating Perceptual Focus in Advertisments
At Science Daily is an
article about how to arrange advertised items so as to make the targeted item stand out:
In a new study from the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, researchers from Northwestern University
demonstrate how advertisements can be manipulated to cause overemphasis of a particular feature and increase the
likelihood that a certain product is chosen. Their finding runs contrary to economic models, which assume that
choices are based on stable preferences and should not be influenced by the inclusion of inferior options.
"By showing the impact of perceptual focus on consumer preferences, this research demonstrates that in addition to
the many overt ways companies can draw attention to products, the visual arrangement of alternatives can also have a
significant influence on their relative choice shares," explain Ryan Hamilton, Jiewen Hong, and Alexander Chernev.
In a series of fascinating experiments, the authors show how grouping together options with similar
characteristics
can emphasize dissimilar options and help them pop-out. For example, consider a comparison of two sofas, A and B.
Sofa A has softer cushions; Sofa B is more durable. In a head-to-head comparison, sofa A is preferred by less than
half of the survey participants -- 42.3 percent.
However, if sofas A and B are grouped with three other sofas, all of which have a low rating for cushion softness,
then preference for sofa A jumps to 77.4 percent. One of these things is not like the others, and that apparently
makes it more desirable -- a phenomenon the authors term "perceptual focus effect."
"The research presented in this article has practical implications for manufacturers and retailers in determining
the
size and composition of their product assortments," conclude the authors. "In particular, when designing product
displays, in both print and electronic media, companies need to be aware of the potential impact of the visual
characteristics of choice alternatives on consumer preferences."
The researchers also found that how consumers process information can influence how susceptible they are to
perceptual focus effect. Those who rely on intuition are more likely to choose a perpetually focal option. In
addition, having participants perform an analytical test before making a product choice drained logical reasoning
resources and increased the likelihood that the person would choose the perpetually focal option.
Reference: Ryan Hamilton, Jiewen Hong, and Alexander Chernev. "Perceptual Focus Effects in Choice" Journal of
Consumer Research: August 2007.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago.
[/Personal/Business]
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Trading Site of the Day -- QCode
QCode is a bare bones site linking type site for:
- Quant Jobs: appears to be live linked to appropriate references at other sites
- Links to Recent Papers
- Links to a few Quant and option related sites
- There is a forum with some activity
- Probably one of the most interesting is the links to various software libraries, hence the name of the site.
[/Trading/SiteOfTheDay/D200707]
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2007 Jul 24 - Tue
Trading Site of the Day -- Two Journals of Note
These are of an academic nature:
[/Trading/SiteOfTheDay/D200707]
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2007 Jul 17 - Tue
IQFeed Client v1.3 Release
It seams that the client needs to be revised with recent version of the SmartQuant
libraries. This one is built with the July 10, 2007 release of libraries. This build may
resolve a System.BadImageFormatException. I hope. Here is IQFeed v1.3.
[/Trading/SmartQuant/Articles]
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IQFeed Client Release 1.2
This client set is released with DTN/IQFeed's latest client v4.2.1.4. This release
of
the IQFeed SmartQuant Provider
v1.2 suppresses an exception when it finds an invalid time in the 18th field of
level 1 data. It caused DC to crash and burn, or halt and freeze, as the case may be.
There is a report that it has an image exception when used with OpenQuant. I havn't run
OpenQuant, so can't confirm. Please let me know of repeatable issues iwth OpenQuant.
[/Trading/SmartQuant/Articles]
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2007 Jul 10 - Tue
SmartQuant QuantDeveloper & DataCenter Release
SmartQuant has released a revision
to DataCenter and
QuantDeveloper. DataCenter and QuantDeveloper are at the following revision levels:
DataCenter
Version 2.3.2 (10-Jul-2007)
QuantDeveloper Enterprise Edition
Version 2.6.2 (10-Jul-2007)
QuantDeveloper Source Code
Version 2.6.2 (10-Jul-2007)
* Recent Versions available through
version control
[/Trading/SmartQuant/Releases]
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2007 Jul 08 - Sun
TransactionSet Code
For what its worth, there was a request for my TransactionSet code at the SmartQuant Forums. This is my description of the code:
I don't really use the ClOrdId per-se for anything other than reporting an order number. Instead a I created a series of transaction objects, with
each storing an opening market/limit order and a starting stop order. When I need to exit, the transaction object then takes care of closing out any
stops/markets/limits that are still outstanding. I can then calculate profit/loss (which I could have used from already existing QD API elementes),
but I go one step further and maintain other statistics such as time-to-fill, time-in-trade, ... More than anything, the transaction object has
helped simplify/encapsulate the trading state-machine for tracking unfilled limits and stops. And it does it smoothly by making use of the two
events I mentioned earlier. Then from a higher level perspective, on a market direction change, I can simply tell the transaction to 'exit' and it
does what ever clean up is necessary
The code is located in the file TransactionSet.cs.
[/Trading/SmartQuant/Articles]
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