Documentation for Investment and Trading Systems including Excel V
 

Just wanted to let people know about a new, free Encyclopedia for Investors
and Traders who are building or maintaining systems:

Http://www.itsdoc.org

"itsdoc" stands for "It's Documentation."

The site attempts to provide highly accurate documentation in an
encyclopedia format. It's 100% free, with no advertising whatsoever and no
soliciting. The entity is entirely non-profit.

Users are invited to contribute high quality material to the site and also
draw from the considerable knowledge base hosted there. If you are coding
investment and trading systems you will probably find this site extremely
helpful.

It's new, the official launch isn't until January so the site has a few
rough edges right now. Still, its very useful.

There are a few select Excel tables covering investment topics on the site
and I hope to post a considerable amount of Excel/VBA code related to
investing in near future.

I hope you get a lot out of it. Please help promote it and put something
back into it too.

Rick
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peter.wall
WTF?
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Peter,

To avoid spamming, I'll post one more time to EXCEL-L and unless there are
more general questions Ill be happy to respond individually. Just mail
to: rick_at_ITSdoc_point_org

Here is the logic behind ITSdoc.org which stands for €œIts Documentation.€�

In the past, there were many people on this list from major investment
houses, brokers, traders, sophisticated individual investors, etc. that
worked Excel quite hard when doing investment analysis. Virtually all
analysts producing buy/hold/sell investment reports including earnings
estimates are familiar with Excel. I was hoping to reach some of these
power user / VBA programming types, particularly stock and bond
international players.

I myself have done a ton with Excel and VBA in the investment area, yet
much work remains to take it to a higher, more integrated level. I looked
around for various open source projects in the investments area that might
be of interest and found quite a few, all spread out to Java, Excel/VBA,
C++, C#, Perl, Lisp, PHP ... etc. In total there is a good volume of great
quality open source code. Plus, there is a huge amount of coding talent
waiting €œin the wings€� to demonstate expertise in this area.

Taking a cue from MSFT I thought, write the objects one-time, and then
allow each language group to call them in their own unique way. I took that
a step further and decided the whole thing needs to start out with a clear
road map €“ i.e. great documentation, prior to even begin to think about
writing the code for the object libraries, or trying to adapt existing open
source code to work more coherently together. To set a clear direction I
envisioned taking a 20-year forward view in terms of designing the open
source code library. The result of that thinking is an attempt to collect
and collate the documentation that would be required to start that process,
all on a well-organized, neutral site. The documentation would then
liberate coders from having to learn all about investments from the ground
up and to discover the various difficulties in dealing with asynchronous
messaging, floor brokers, crossed markets, options and futures expirations,
fundamental data feeds, cleaning up dirty data, hooking up to others
systems, conforming to emerging message standards, etc.

ITSdoc.org is the result of that thinking. The site allows multiple open
source projects to begin to share at least meta level documentation, all
written in a style enjoyable for coders. The goal is to coalesce better,
more integrated open source object libraries in the investment area.

Frankly, because of my own personal highly positive attitude towards Excel
and VBA, I would like that that language to be very well represented in all
of this, hence, the posting here. In the open source arena the Java players
tend to quickly take the high ground. I want to insure there is a good
continuing role for Excel and VBA.

Of course Excel / VBA isnt the logical choice for some of the more intense
real-time analytical work, high speed data feed processing, basic database
tables, or heavy data visualization tasks. However, when it comes to rows,
columns, pivot tables, and visual programming on the fly, it just cant be
beat!