All you need is IMP

Meet John*

John is a hard-working guy with a handle on his finances.

John has some extra capital, and wants to invest

What are John’s options?

*He knows what you did last IMP

Advantages Disadvantages

Safe: mutual or index funds are among the safest investments that John could make

Hands-off: John doesn’t touch the money once the fund has it.

SLOOOOW: fairly low rate of return that often hardly beats the general market trend

Fund managers take a cut, and this comes out of John’s profit (or pocket if the fund doesn’t make enough money)

Penalties for liquidating Nearly IMPossible to

control where his money is invested

Mutual/Index Fund

Crispety Crunchety Peanut-Buttery IMP

Advantages Disadvantages

Relatively safe, and John’s portfolio might be able to beat the returns of slow-but-safe funds.

Easy: John pays his broker to worry about his investments, although John has IMProved control over his portfolio, more than with a fund.

John doesn’t have much direct control of his portfolio.

Professional brokers make their money from somewhere: John’s profit and pocket.

Professional BrokerYo quiero IMP

Advantages Disadvantages

Relatively cheap: small commissions are paid on each trade, and a minimum portfolio value may be required

Control: Nobody is telling John where he should invest his money

No one is telling John where he should invest his money!

John is almost as likely to lose money as he is to make money, and it’s not probably that he’ll consistently beat the market average

Relatively small errors in prediction can have a large negative IMPact on his finances

Online Brokerage (E*TRADE)

In IMP we trust

Advantages Disadvantages

Relatively cheap: small commissions are paid on each trade, and a minimum portfolio value may be required

Control: Nobody is telling John where he should invest his money

No one is telling John where he should invest his money!

If John is only as good at picking stocks as the average investor, he will only make money if the market improves, he won’t be beating other investors.

Relatively small errors in prediction can have a large negative IMPact on his finances

Online Brokerage (E*TRADE)

In IMP we trust

John has problems

John’s options Pay a fund manager or broker to take control of his

money away Make mostly arbitrary stock picks, and sink any

money he might make into trade fees with an online brokerage

These options aren’t that goodWhat can John do?

Did somebody say IMP?

GOT IMP?

IMP: IMP for Market Prediction

IMP? Yes, please!

IMP enables John to use his knowledge of economics and investments to his advantage, while not relying on fallible hunches

IMP allows the average investor access to deeper analyses of stock data than the stock page in the newspaper. P/E ratios don’t cut it when John can use Markov Chaining and Bayesian Inference

Customization: There’s no wrong way to IMP

John can write his own methods for combining commonly known algorithms for market prediction, giving John unique predictions for the market

John can even write his own algorithms if he feels ambitious or inspired enough, and IMP will integrate and test the performance of his algorithm.

As easy as IMP

John is probably not going to want to start off with something as advanced as writing new prediction algorithms, so IMP will make it easy to jump right into investing

IMP comes preloaded with a number of algorithms that John can graphically compare using real-time data for whichever stock he’d like.

Bigger - Better - IMP

IMP enables the average investor to get an edge over the next guy, and encourages good research and creativity, rather than lucky guesses.

IMP takes the power away from the investment elite and puts it in YOUR hands.

IMP is right for anyone thinking about their financial future.

IMPortant Features

Easy to read GUISmart default optionsAdvanced options

For experienced usersStock scraper

Stores stock info from the webWatched stock list

Specified by the user

More IMP Please

Ability to graph market trend dataVariety of built-in algorithms

Moving average Deviation Regression

DAEMON toolkit Provides ability for user-created algorithms Potential to share with online community

CHANGING AT THE SPEED OF INFORMATION

COMING IN 2012

IMP 2.0 and Jabberwocky

IMProvements

Algorithm Support Service Subscription based service Provide new algorithms Provide support

Alert interfacing Interface with email, instant messaging, etc.

Jabberwocky: Feed the IMP

IMP’s partnered online brokerageInterface with Jabberwocky will be integrated

into IMPAllows users to make different kinds of smart

trades i.e. bulk trades

Group dynamics: Who’s IMP is it Anyway?

No group leader More a self-organizing team

Members with skills appropriate to current iteration would step up and take lead Programming, UML, documentation, etc

What Worked: IMPossible? I Think Not

GUI turned out intuitive and user-friendly

DAEMON algorithm creation tool kit was successful

Basic built-in algorithms were created Moving average Regression

Team cooperation and organization

What Didn’t Work: Who Let the IMP Out?

Advanced algorithms packaged with IMP

A few of the packaged algorithms were not created Exponential smoothing Markov chain