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The Spider Financial Blog is your source for insights, updates and user tips from our team of experts. Whether you’re a quant, statistician, trader, risk manager, portfolio manager or other financial professional, the Spider Financial Blog can help you stay current on the trends and strategies you need to know

NumXL 2.0 Beta is delayed, but Imminent

NumXL 2.0 (Beta) will be further delayed to address few issues raised during our preliminary tests and to add new advanced models (e.g. ARFIMA, IGARCH, etc). The delay will allow our engineers to continue working on those enhancement and to apply patches for all known problems. Fortunately, there are no relatively big new issues, so it should be a short delay.

Tentatively, we are looking at the third week of March 2010 for release date.

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NumXL 1.0 Service Pack 2 (SP2)

We are actively working on the second maintenance release of NumXL 1.0. The new release includes several important fixes for reported issues, new functions, and few minor function enhancements.

For a complete list of changes, please visit NumXL change-log page

The new release will be posted online by end of January 26th,2010 (GMT-6). We recommend all users to download this update for the fixes included. 

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NumXL 1.0 Professional (Trial)

A new NumXL 1.0 with full-support to license keys is available online . The new edition includes no code changes, and it is introduced primarily to unlock the professional-only functions during the 60-days trial period. After the end of trial period, NumXL will revert to the (freeware)or Lite mode.

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NumXL 2.0 Beta is in the work

We are actively working on the second major release of NumXL. The plans for NumXL 2.0 were driven primarily by numerous feedback from our users.

In this coming edition, there will be inevitably few changes despite our relentless attempts to keep the functions set static. We are hoping that the simplicity and added functions in the new version will offset any inconvenience experienced by our users.

Tentatively, we are planning to have our first release of NumXL for beta users early in January 2010.

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Official Release of NumXL 1.0

[October 1st,2009] SPIDER Financial has announced today the official release of NumXL - the econometrics analytical software - version 1.0 to the general public.

What's changed in this release?

The latest release includes few minor fixes, revised documentation (i.e. help file, tutorials, and case studies) and enhanced user-interfaces (UI) improving the usability of the software. To see a full list of changes in this release, please check release notes .

How to download and install NumXL 1.0

The official release is available for download on our website. We recommend all users download this update for the minor fixes included. You can download and install NumXL 1.0 at NumXL 1.0 Download site

NOTE: Before you can install the new version, please uninstall the old version on your machine.

License agreement

The NumXL 1.0 is released under freeware license agreement . Users are advised to review the license agreement .

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NumXL 1.0 Release Delayed, but Imminent

NumXL 1.0 will be delayed to iron out issues detected at last moment. The delay will allow our engineers to continue working on those issues and to apply patches for other known problems. Fortunately, there are no relatively big new issues, so it should be a short delay.

Tentatively, we are looking at the end of September 2009 for release date.

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NumXL 1.0 is scheduled for release on Sept 7th, 2009

[August 12th,2009] NumXL - the econometrics analytics software - is currently under active development in preparation to its official Release on September 7th, 2009.

What's changed in this release?

The latest release includes few minor fixes, revised documentation (i.e. help file, tutorials, and case studies) and enhanced user-interfaces (UI) improving the usability of the software. To see a full list of changes in this release, please check release notes .

How to download and install 1.0

The official release will be available for download on September 7th. We recommend all users download this update for the minor fixes included. You can download and install NumXL 1.0 at NumXL 1.0 Download site

NOTE: Before you can install the new version, please uninstall the old version on your machine.

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NumXL 1.0RC is planned to launch on July 24th,2009

NumXL - the econometrics analytics software - is currently under active development in preparation to its RC Release on July 24th, 2009.

What's changed in this release?

Although, the new release includes few minor fixes, we have redesigned its documentation (i.e. help file, tutorials, and case studies) and availed an extensive set of user-interfaces (UI) natively improving the usability of the software. To see a full list of changes in this release, please check release notes .

How to download and install 1.0 RC

The RC release will be available for download on July 24th. We recommend all users download this update for the minor fixes included. You can download and install NumXL 1.0 RC at NumXL 1.0 Download site

NOTE: Before you can install the new version, please uninstall the old version on your machine.

License agreement

The NumXL is released under freeware license agreement . Users are advised to review the license agreement .

 

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White-paper: Optimal Strategy - Buy LO and Sell HI

The optimal trading strategy is to buy low and sell high. This is easier said than done, and many of us invest lot of effort experimenting with strategies in an attempt to get closer to this end. In this paper, we construct this hypothetical optimal strategy, analyze its returns and construct an econometric model to capture its time dynamics. Next, using the model, we forecast the conditional returns and compare them with returns of actual strategies. Finally, we discuss their application in stop-loss optimization for actual trading strategies.

The white-paper and the supporting financial model are available on our website to all our registered users.

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CalendarXL 1.0 ALPHA testing starts on July 12th

Chicago July 8th,2009 - SPIDER financial announced the start date of the ALPHA testing for the company’s date and calendar analytics software - CalendarXL 1.0.

CalendarXL is a perfect compliment to NumXL and financial time series analysis; It provides advanced Date & Calendar calculation functions within Microsoft Excel making it easy to to examine past or predict future holidays or economical data announcement, to calculate working days in a holding period, to generate a custom series of dates, etc

Users who wish to download and test CalendarXL Alpha should visit www.spiderfinancial.com/products/calendarxl to get the software release.

How to download and install 1.0 ALPHA

We recommend all users download this update for the minor fixes included. You can download and install CalendarXL 1.0 ALPHA now at CalendarXL 1.0 Download site

License agreement

The official release of CalendarXL will be released under our commercial license agreement . Users are advised to review the license agreement .

 

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White-paper: Futures returns and P&L

Exchange-listed futures are increasingly used in active strategies; they are offer leverage, efficient access to illiquid physical markets, and risk management tool. In this paper, we illustrate the issues and procedure related to incorporating futures in our strategy (e.g. Contract specifications, Margin requirement, contract size, leverage, mark-to-market (MTM) etc.). We define returns on margin and examine closely P&L draw throughout the day

The white-paper and the supporting financial model are available on our website to all our registered users.

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White-paper: Strategy's returns and P&L

Developing a trading strategy is an itertative process; it begins with forming few trading ideas, back-testing, and drawing conclusions or forming new ideas and starting over. This paper discusses the back-testing process of the strategy; we demonstartes the steps, issues and assumptions made during the preparation of the data sample and the calculation of the hypothesized startegy's returns. Finally, we turn our attention to risk aspect of the strategy and its application within an established trading environment with common risk management policies.

The white-paper and the supporting financial model are available on our website to all our registered users.

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Coming Soon: Financial Time Series Analysis White-papers

In this series (white papers), we touch on several practical issues faced in constructing trading strategy, generating returns, examining the profit & loss profile, placing a stop-loss or limit order with strategy, accounting for execution slippage and transaction costs, leveraging using margin or futures, etc.

We conducted all our analysis within Microsoft Excel using built-in functionality and SPIDER Add-ins suite.

The case studies series will be released on June 20th, 2009 on our website along with the financial model spreadsheet to all our registered users.

 

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Coming Soon: XHGXL 1.0

Analyzing exchange-listed derivatives time series, our users need to incorporate the contract specifications in effect. For instance, a trading strategist analyzing the futures prices would need to identify the corresponding future contract (i.e. exchange symbol) at each date, contract's expiry date (i.e. last trading date),  contract's delivery dates (first & last delivery dates) and other listed contracts (different delivery months), etc. The listing exchanges publish the contract specifications detailing size, price change and the rules to compute the different important dates.

This is soon to be a problem of the past once we release the XHGXL (aka Exchange-XL).

XHGXL Logo  

XHGXL is an analytical tool for exchange-listed products. XHGXL makes it easy to to examine contract specification and perform related calculations: trading days to expiry, delivery start date, delivery basket, contract size, front-contract symbol, etc.. XHGXL will work with all current versions of Microsoft Excel.

If you have an interest in being a beta tester of the XHGXL, please contact us

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Coming Soon: CalendarXL 1.0

Our users often face the need to process the information in the dates component of the time series. For instance, a financial strategist desires to examine the long-weekend effect on his/her startegy returns, effect of number of trading days in his/her holding period on volatility,  or construct a sequence of dates for first and/or last trading day on NYSE, etc. Currently, our users find themselves overwhelmed looking up past/future holidays for given market(s) (e.g. US-GOV, NYSE, CBOE, LIFFE, NYMEX, etc.), and  manually examing individual observation in their data sets.

This approach described earlier is not only mundane, error prone, but it is not directly productive; our users opt to spend that time examining the significance of proposed phenomena.

Fortunately, this is soon to be a problem of the past once we release the CalendarXL.

CalendarXL Logo  

CalendarXL is a Date & Calendar calculator Add-in for Microsoft Excel. CalendarXL makes it easy to to examine past holidays, to anticipate future ones, to calculate working days and to generate a sequence of dates that fits their exact criteria for different calendars/markets.  CalendarXL will work with all current versions of Microsoft Excel.

If you have an interest in being a beta tester of the CalendarXL, please contact us

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SPIDER Financial Releases NumXL 1.0 Beta

[Chicago May 13th,2009] - SPIDER financial released today the Beta update of the company’s econometric analytics software - NumXL 1.0.

What's changed in this release?

The new release includes minor fixes and significant new functionality for algorithmic traders, strategists, analysts and economists. To see a full list of changes in this release, please check release notes .

How to download and install 1.0 Beta

We recommend all users download this update for the minor fixes included. You can download and install NumXL 1.0 Beta now at NumXL 1.0 Download site

NOTE: Before you can install the new version, please uninstall the old version on your machine.

License agreement

The NumXL is released under freeware license agreement . Users are advised to review the license agreement .

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