InfoArb - financial research management software

Design Team Members: Aeree Ko, Sukwon Oh

Supervisor: Hui, H. Huang

Background

Professional investors like portfolio managers and analysts manage a large amount of research from numerous sources as part of investment process. Following paragraph from SmartMoney Stock Picker's Bible depicts a typical information collection process of security analysis.

"Reporters (Equity research analysts) might spend up to a week or even two researching a single stock... In that time, your can bet they've read everything about the company they can get their hands on: the annual report, the company's most recent Form 10-K or Form 10-Q (maybe even both), analyst report, recent headlines, the company web site. They've also talked to someone at the company (ideally the CFO, if not the CEO) and to numerous equity analysts and fund managers. And often they've interviewed experts at data research firms...and maybe even talked with some of the company's competitors (or read their Form 10-Ks, annual reports, analysts reports, recent headlines, etc.) to get a read on the rest of the industry...[1] After the analyst gathers information on a security and organizes it in a systematic and analytical fasion; then, from these data he or she draws conclusions regarding the quality of the security"[2]

As you can see from the above description, the equity research analysts have a lot of information to process for the security valuation. Four problems identified when gathering and organizing the information.

Project description

InfoArb is a web application facilitating information collection process of equity analysts. Developed in ASP.NET with a database backend, each user is given a private storage for storing user-specific information that is accessible anywhere with internet connection. Three views of InfoArb allow user to collect information in orderly manner and input any user-specific commentaries. The solution would thus give easy access to information, allow customized information management, enable classification of data while collecting information, and archive any commentaries.

Design methodology

InfoArb is a user-interactive web application. It is composed of three design views. In mindmap view, flow diagram of user collected informations are displayed. Each information stored by user is drawn as a node and the connections are made to represent any relation between the informations. The information can include any user-highlighted information, tables, charts, etc. This view will be implemented as one of available mindmapping software embedded inside the view page. In notebook view, chronological display of user selected information is displayed as in a notebook. The information is grouped under different category specified by user. The information can be of text, picture, table, and chart. User will be able to expand and collapse groupings of informations. The functionality will be implemented using Google Web Toolkit API. Information is user-specific; therefore, Google Authentication API will also be used to implement user log-in process. Finally, in price graph view, an interactive stock price graph is displayed. The graph will be implemented using Macromedia Flash technology and uses Google Visualization API. The core of InfoArb will be developed under Microsoft Visual C# ASP.NET and integrated with mySQL database server. InfoArb is designed using Three-tier architecture. Moreover, InfoArb uses a word add-on, excel add-on, and internet explorer add-on developed under Visual C# to effectively extract user wanted information.