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Equities Lab
“The market IS our lab rat”
What's the problem?
"Individuals run into rat holes when trying to invest"
Using Money managers
• Most professional money managers are great at sales – not great at investing
• You lose money to overhead and fees
Invest in Mutual Funds
• As a type of investment, mutual funds have badly underperform the rest of the market for
20 years.
Invest in ETFs
Day Trading
Following News
• Better then any of the other options but …
• Very correlated with the overall market.
• Can be subject to the Ponzi effect.
• Despite very good tooling, most day traders do not make money.
• Takes a large investment of time.
• Reading news has been proven harmful to investing performance (Tversky, Montier, et al)
• No way to understand ideas behind the recommendations, beyond reading the sales spiel
What's wrong with the current tools?
"In other words, why are we special?"
To our knowledge, every competitor has one (or more) of the following Achilles's heels ..
Crippled Scope
Limited UI
Bad Data
• If you only know the price,
P/E, and Market Cap of a
company, it is very hard to
do any meaningful analysis
on it!
• (To be fair, most of these
tools were actually designed
for day traders, not
fundamental investors)
•Can take 10-15 forms to
run a simple back test
•Only supports very simple
queries (“PE” > “50)
•Limited (if any) tools to
visualize your data
•No way to monitor your
investments
• Survivorship bias
• Companies that went
bankrupt simply disappear,
so strategies that pick high
risk companies all look
great… because the losers
are not included
• Restated earnings
• Companies restate
earnings all the time, these
tools then use those
restated earnings. That
would work great… If
you had a crystal ball and
could know in 2011 what
the earnings will be
restated as in 2012!
Equities Lab's Data
"Somebody fed us too much cat food"
14,000
stocks
200+ fields per
company in the
present
Going back each
year and each
quarter to 2003
Point in time
data
No survivorship
bias
Catch companies
restating their
numbers
Financial
statements
and more
Cash flow
Income
statements
Balance sheet
Fast Data
Access
Custom number
format
Column based
layout
Efficient data
storage using OS
memory maps
3+ Terabytes of
data if fully
expanded
Price data
Zip code,
number of
employees,
etc…
Equities Lab’s UI
“The cat’s meow”
Intuitive monitoring of
current investments
Powerful
visualization tools
allow you to easily
analyze the market
Flexible expression editor
finds the stocks you want to buy